Gap Creek (19 page)

The pasture was bounded by the branch on one side, and in places the stream had washed out posts so they hung on the wires above the water. It was a wonder the cow hadn’t got out by going under the wire. Leaves had washed down the branch and piled up in the pools in wads and wedges.

“
Eeeeeerrrrrr
,” something whistled in the sky above. I looked up and seen a hawk floating up there. I didn’t know what it was watching, maybe a field mouse, or a squirrel. There was no baby chicks for it to catch that I was aware of. I walked along the fence to where the pasture started up the side of the mountain. I guess bottom land along the creek was too valuable to use for pasture on Gap Creek, for only a few acres of pasture was near the creek flats. Where the pasture was steep, some of the ground was cleared and some under trees. I had not been out in the woods since I got married and come down to South Carolina. It felt good to be in the open, and to smell the old leaves in ditches and in the branch.

I turned to look at the valley. Gap Creek was just a narrow, twisty cove that wound for a few miles between the ridges. There was a rock cliff high on the opposite ridge that looked like a wrinkled face frowning at the fields below. “Fussy Face,” I named it, speaking out loud. Old Fussy Face, that like a statue kept watch on the seasons passing and the people on the road below. The rock looked down like a silent idol on the passing seasons. It made me feel something I couldn’t name. Gap Creek valley was so narrow, so pinched between the flanks of the ridges, it looked like a toy valley, a model of a cove in the mountains. The tops of the ridges had been stripped bare by the wind, but the lower slopes and the holler itself still had color.

I turned around and climbed a little more, and seen this white
thing through the trees. It looked like a face, or a piece of snow. I stopped and tried to think what it might be. Was it somebody watching me? Was it a piece of white cloth? The thing was about waist high, best I could figure. I started walking, for I guessed whatever it was couldn’t hurt me.

As I got closer something run away from the white spot. I seen a flash of white disappear and knowed it was a deer that went bounding off to jump the fence and disappear into the woods. Still closer I saw what appeared to be a white skull on a stob, except it was too square to be a skull and the eye holes was wrong. I thought it was a piece of ice. And then I saw it was a salt lick. Mr. Pendergast had put a block of salt on a stick for his cow to lick, and the deer had come out of the woods to lick it too.

“Mr. Pendergast is gone but his salt is still shining up here,” I said, not sure what I meant. I turned and looked toward the trees and seen a deer watching me from the shadows. It was waiting to come back and lick the salt, waiting for me to get out of its way. I thought how everything craved salt.

Mama had told me that during the Confederate War when you couldn’t buy nothing at the store, and there wasn’t any money, salt was the scarcest thing of all. Salt was ten dollars a pound, then fifty dollars a pound. It got to where you couldn’t buy it for any price. Where there was a salt spring back in the mountains, people went there to boil the water down to catch the salt. They fought over water there and at least one got shot. People got so hungry for salt they dug up the dirt of their smokehouse floors and boiled it to get the salt drippings out.

I LEFT THE salt block so the deer could come back to lick and savor it. I wanted to climb higher so I could see more of the valley. I wanted to get out in the woods by myself the way I used to on the
mountain. I wanted to stretch my lungs and my legs, and to get up high on the ridge. I wanted to get away from the house and not think about Hank for a while. I wanted to forget how unhappy he was, and how I had give the money to Jerrold James.

Just as I got to the edge of the woods a gust of wind hit the hickory trees and gold leaves floated out across the valley like flocks of birds. Leaves swirled and fluttered. The air was filled and the sky was filled as trees all over the side of the mountain give up their leaves to the gust. Red leaves and yellow leaves and orange leaves shivered in the air. Wind raked across the mountain and combed through the trees, and it looked like the whole mountain was breathing out leaves.

I run through the leaves like they was butterflies whirling around me. I slapped at the flying leaves like they was colorful snowflakes. I would be too heavy to run and climb in the woods before long. So I might as well run while I was thrilled by the wind and had a chance. I climbed over the fence and run through the hickories and under the maples and poplars. The air was alive with leaves bright as goldfish. I slapped at a floating leaf and turned and run up the ridge.

The ground was deep in fresh-fell leaves, and leaves sparkled like they was waxed and oiled. I kicked up a cloud of leaves. I kicked up a fog of new-fell leaves. I kicked away the leaves in front of me like deep fresh snow. Leaves swarmed around my head, clicking as they touched. I waved my arms and swatted them away. I danced with the leaves and made them swirl faster. I laughed out loud and laughed at the top of my voice. I caught leaves in my apron and pitched them away.

When I got out of breath I was almost at the top of the mountain. The wind was colder there. I skipped and stumbled through poplars to the very top. Just under the summit, where a kind of bed was protected from the wind, I laid down on my back in the clean,
fresh leaves. I wanted to rest in a spot out of the breeze. I laid back with my arms spread out in the leaves the way you do to make angels in snow. I’d never heard of “leaf angels” but I guess you could make them.

The trees was thinner at the ridge top and their limbs had already been stripped of leaves. I looked right up through the lightning shapes of limbs to the blue sky. There was a few leaves flying by up there, and I saw a bird, and then I seen a flock of geese going by in a point, like the head of an arrow. But after the geese went by I saw nothing but blue sky. Through the gray lightning of the limbs I looked right into the deep sky.

Now it was the strangest thing to look deeper and deeper into the blue. Most times you look into the sky and just see haze and blue. Unless there is clouds and you look past the clouds. But this time I looked into the clear sky and saw the
depth
in the sky. I looked past the clear air into the further miles of air, and still deeper where the air was thinning out to nothing. I looked until I could see nothing but emptiness, out toward the stars, though I couldn’t see the stars in daylight.

I looked so deep and long I felt I was falling. I was following my sight right out and through the limbs and into the empty air. Instead of looking up, I felt I was hanging from the ground and looking down, further and further down, miles and years down, mile after empty mile. I was falling far down into the nothing. I was whooshing down deeper and deeper into the emptiness. And the thought of falling forever and forever froze me. I stiffened myself like I was flying faster and faster. I felt like I was going to explode.

I closed my eyes and the feel of falling stopped. I felt the fresh leaves on my back and opened my eyes and seen the trees around me. A daddy longlegs prickled on the leaves nearby. It had already throwed its perfume, as they do when they’re scared, and I smelled the musky odor.

Standing up I looked at things close by: a fallen sourwood, a little holly tree. It felt so good to have my feet on the ground again, I stomped into the leaves going down the ridge. I stepped firm to grip the ground. I stomped hard to make dints in the soft ground under the leaves, digging my heels into the steep side of the mountain, making steps. I didn’t want to go back down the way I had come up and tended to the left, to come out of the woods further down the valley. I had never been in the woods below the Pendergast place. I wanted to see a little more of Gap Creek before I returned to the house.

As my balance come back I took bigger steps down the mountain. I swung around trees and fairly jumped between trees. I skipped, and one time slid in the leaves right on my behind. But it felt good, almost like skidding on a board or a sled. I scooted down in the leaves and then stood up and run, pretending I couldn’t stop myself, and slapped at sourwoods and young hickories. I run until the ground leveled out and I was standing almost on the valley floor.

THAT EVENING I was thinking about fixing supper, about making some cornbread and baking taters, and opening a can of beans from the basement, when I seen Hank coming into the back yard carrying a big old bird. I thought at first it must be a goose, but it was too big even to be a goose.

“Fix this turkey,” he said and throwed it down on the back porch. “I’m tired. I had to walk all the way to Caesar’s Head.”

“I walked to the top of the ridge,” I said.

“What for?” Hank said, taking off his mackinaw coat.

“I was looking for chestnuts,” I said. I didn’t want to say I went walking just to see the woods, to be outdoors in the fall weather. That wouldn’t have sounded right.

“Did you find any?” Hank said.

“A few,” I said. I didn’t want Hank to think I went gallivanting around the woods just to be footloose. After all, I was carrying a baby. I didn’t want to tell him I had gone dancing around in the woods with the flying leaves, and that I laid on the mountaintop looking into the sky till it felt like I was falling out toward the stars. The best way I could show him how helpful I was was to keep my mouth shut and fix the turkey.

I BOILED A pot of water on the stove and carried it out on the back porch. A turkey is harder to dip than a hen, because it’s bigger and longer, and the feathers are so long and stiff they don’t even want to fit in the pot. I held the turkey by the neck and by the feet and doused it into the smoking water. The water was so hot the steam near about burned me. I plunged the bird in and let it soak. Then when I pulled it out, the water streaming from the feathers smoked in the cold evening air. The drops almost scalded me as I pulled out the big tail feathers and wing feathers. Even the back feathers of a turkey are stiff and long.

I pulled out handfuls of feathers and throwed them in the yard, thinking I’d clean them up later. But the wind swept them across the yard and into the weeds. I plucked until my hands was covered with little feathers and pin feathers and down stuck to my wrists. I plucked the carcass until the skin looked bumpy and hairy. And then I lit a piece of newspaper and singed away the rest of the pin feathers and down. Nothing looks as naked as a plucked and singed bird.

After that I had to wash my hands and dry them on my apron. Taking the sharpest knife in the kitchen, I rubbed it some more on the whetrock on the back porch and then took the bird out to the chopping block and cut off the head and feet. The blood had darkened and thickened, but a good bit still poured out the neck. Now
the messy part of dressing a bird is when you have to slice open the belly and take the guts out. There’s a stink when you scald the feathers and pluck them, but it’s not as sickening as the smell of guts. The smell that come out of the belly was worse than the stink of chicken piles and the chicken house. The bird was cold but the smell was hot as something burning.

This is what I have to do for Hank, and for myself, I thought. It made me mad to have to pull out the squishy cold guts and rake them into the weeds beyond the chopping block. Dogs would come in the night and eat them up. But I had to make Hank feel good about hisself, to make him feel strong and in charge of things. If he wanted to go off into the mountains to kill a turkey and bring it back for me to fix, then that was the least I could do.

I cleaned out the turkey inside and washed it with dippers of water. I thought about cutting it up the way you do a chicken, but the body was too big to fry. I didn’t have a pan that would hold it. I would have to bake it in the oven. That would take about four hours, and we would have to eat late. But the turkey would be a feast. Maybe it would cheer up Hank and make him forget he had lost his job. Maybe it would make him happy he had moved to Gap Creek. Maybe he would forget I had give away the jar of money to the man in the buggy. I tried to think about what I had to stuff into the turkey. My supply of herbs and spices was meager. But I did have some biscuits left over from breakfast, and some sage and pepper. I crumbled the biscuits and sliced some taters into them, and sprinkled four or five herbs into the mixture. I stirred it up and added a little vinegar before stuffing it inside the turkey. Then I slid it all into the oven.

“It’ll take at least four hours,” I said to Hank as he lifted the milk bucket off its nail.

“There’s a thousand turkeys up there,” he said.

“Up where?”

“In the holler below Caesar’s Head,” he said.

“In the gap where Gap Creek comes from?” I said.

“No no no, in the gap to the west,” Hank said. “There is turkeys in the trees and in the bushes. They was eating chestnuts on top of the ridge. There is enough turkeys to last all winter.”

“Then we won’t starve,” I said. But the second it come out I was sorry I’d said it.

“Do you think I’m gonna let you starve?” Hank said.

I was about to answer that I hadn’t meant it that way, but he had already slammed the door and was gone.

WITH HANK NOT making any wages, and with winter on its way and Christmas on its way, I begun to think of some means of getting a little cash. I never cared a thing about money, except when I needed something, or to buy presents. I wanted to send something to Mama, and to my sisters up on the mountain. And I figured Hank would want to buy something for Ma Richards, if not for his brothers. We wouldn’t likely have a chance to go up to Painter Mountain or to Mount Olivet, but we could mail some presents if we had them. And I wanted to buy a present for Hank too. I could always make him something, but I wanted to order something from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

I didn’t have any money of my own. I looked in my purse and found I still had only thirty-six cents. That wouldn’t even buy a present for Mama, much less Lou and Rosie and Carolyn. I counted the money and put it back in my purse. There must be something on the place I could sell. The chickens belonged to Mr. Pendergast, but I had fed and watered them and gathered the eggs. Maybe I could sell a few eggs down at the store at the crossroads for twenty cents
a dozen. And if I made some extra butter I might sell it for fifteen cents a pound. But the cow wasn’t giving much milk now, and the milk she did give didn’t have a lot of butter in it. I wouldn’t be able to make more than a few pennies out of butter before Christmas.