Homeplace (30 page)

“Mama always kept a white flour-sack tablecloth over the dinner table,” he said, in the vast kitchen. “Did it to keep out chickens and me and the cats. We had two when I was growing up, and Mama called ‘em the ashcat and the tray-riding cat, because one of them always slept in the warm ashes from the fireplace in the winter, and the other kept trying to sneak up under the tablecloth and get at the cream and the crackling corn-bread and boiled potatoes on the tray she kept under
there. I don’t remember if they had names or not, but I sure remember them. Old yellow tiger and a big tom as black as the ace of spades. I tied their tails together once and hung ‘em over the clothesline, to see ‘em fight. Lord God, they nearly killed each other before Mama caught me and made me let them go. She tanned my hide good for that.” He cackled aloud. “Used to tie kernels of corn to string on the end of fishing poles and trail ‘em around the chicken yard, too. Old Dominecker hen would swallow the corn and you could lead her around all day. Got a hiding for that, too.”

“You must have been a devil,” Sam Canaday said, chuckling. Mike did not laugh. He might have been talking about a boy in a Victorian youth’s novel. She could no more imagine her father’s childhood than she could his vigorous youth. He had, for her, only two personas: remote, glacial middle age and this molting old raptor’s dying.

“Worst hiding I ever got, though, was for jumping out of the cottonseed loft down onto the wagon full of cotton, before it went to the gin. Pa had the team hitched up all ready to go, and I was up there with a pitchfork, just a little old thing, pushing it out to him, and all at once I just hollered, ‘Look, Pa! Look at me!’ and I jumped right out of there and landed on top of a whole bale of cotton. I don’t know if it was me or the cotton he was worried about, but he took me out behind the calf shed and made me drop my britches, and just wore me out with his belt. He never did that before or again. Mama always had to do it, and she used a switch from the privet hedge. Made me go out and pick my own, and sent me back if it was too little. Must have done it a hundred times. But it was that one time with the belt that I remember.”

In one room there was a small, whitewashed fireplace, blackened on the inside and stained around its perimeter with odd, starshaped brownish splotches.

John Winship smiled. “Daddy chewed tobacco. Used to sit here every night before they went to bed … we all sat in their bedroom in the winter, because it was the only bedroom with a fireplace … and I’d eat Yates apples out of a basket by the fireplace, and Mama would tell me stories about the family and all, and Daddy would nod and rock and chew and every now and then he’d let fly … and usually miss. I can still hear Mama squalling at him. She whitewashed that fireplace four or five times a year, and it never went a week before he’d get it again. He never drank or smoked or cussed; no other bad habits, but he did love to chew. I can still see him. You’re the image of him, Micah.”

He did not look around at her, did not seem to realize, even, that there was anyone in the room with him.

He showed them the front parlor, and the pantry, and the little glassed sunroom where his mother had kept her sewing machine and her chum and her quilting frame.

“This is sort of her place; I always remember her here,” he said. “When I think of her, it’s here that I see her.”

He motioned Sam through the room and out to the small veranda off it, and pointed with one thin old claw to the dried bed of an old lily pool. There was a high, curly stone bridge over it, cracked and fallen now, and the collapsed corpses of old white lawn furniture around it. Mike remembered when the pool had been kept full, and there had been great, thick, glossy lily pads in it, and huge, starlike pink and white waterlilies in the summer. She and DeeDee had caught tadpoles there.

“This is his place, Daddy’s. This is where I see him. He used to love to sit out here by the lily pond at night, after supper, and listen to the frogs and watch the lightning bugs. There was one big old frog that hung around here several years; a real monster. I saw him once, and
you could hear him to College Park when he let go. Daddy called him Gikiwalli. Said somebody told him that was Italian for frog. Doesn’t sound right to me, but that’s what we called him. He was still here when I went away to law school. I don’t know what happened to him; wasn’t a cat or a coon alive that could catch him. Pa was out here every night it wasn’t just out and out cold.” He paused, his eyes traveling over the ruined pond and bridge and furniture.

“It was here that I came when he died and cut my hand and let it bleed into the ground,” he said. “Right over there, by that Spanish bayonet. That’s where his chair always was. I’ve still got the scar.”

He looked down at the luminous, withered hand in his lap as if he had never seen it before. Neither Sam nor Mike replied. It was not to them that he spoke.

As Sam rolled him through the house and toward the ramp at the back door, he indicated a small, shedlike room off the porch, no more than a closet, really. In Mike’s time it had been used to store garden tools. Sam Canaday wheeled him to the mouth of the room. There was no door.

“This was my bedroom,” John Winship said. “This was where I slept for eighteen years of my life. It was real snug in here. Ceiling snugged right down over me, and there were no windows, so it was like being in a cave. Way back here at the back of the house, where nobody came unless they had a special reason. Used to feel like I could hide from the world back here and nobody would ever find me; nobody would even know I was in the house. Like Tom Sawyer in that cave. I used to lie here and pretend I was Tom Sawyer. I could hear the train whistles coming up and down the tracks for miles and miles before they got here and I’d pretend it was the Mississippi River out there, and they were riverboats. I’d sleep real good in this little old room, summer and winter, with feather mattresses and
Mama’s quilts piled over me. Felt as safe as a bear in a honey tree. Haven’t slept like that since I was eighteen years old. Kid nowadays wouldn’t be caught dead in a little old closet like this, but I thought it was the finest room in the world.”

He gestured at Sam to take him out of the room and down the ramp to the path to the car, but then signaled him to stop.

“What’s that over there, in the corner?” he said. “Looks like some kind of china, vase or something.”

Mike reached over and picked the object up. It was a shard of a pottery pitcher, with the curved handle still attached, glazed blue and white in a pattern of stripes and whorls. It was incredibly filthy. She picked it up with one finger through the handle and brought it over and laid it in his lap.

“Why,” John Winship said, “it’s the Yankee pitcher. I haven’t seen it since I was a boy. I didn’t even know it was still in the house. Looked all over for it. Look here, Sam and Mike, this pitcher is way over a hundred years old, and some son of a bitch has found it and broke it and just thrown it in a corner. By God, if I had a gun …”

“Why is it called the Yankee pitcher, Colonel?” Sam broke in hastily.

Her father was diverted. “When my greatgrandfather Worthy … your great-great-grandfather, Mike … was off fighting in Virginia, there was only my great-grandmother and a couple of nigger tenants left on the place. She was just a little thing, not shoulder-high to a man, with dark red hair down to her waist, about nineteen, I think. One summer day a troop of Sherman’s boys came through on the way down to Lovejoy and the lieutenant rode up and saw her on the porch and asked her if she had anything to drink, and she brought him out this pitcher full of cold buttermilk. It was the last she had, but I guess she figured she’d
better be nice to him since she sure couldn’t fight him. She had a cow and a couple of calves and a mule down in the swamp bottom; used to go down there at night and tie up their muzzles with strips off her petticoat to keep ‘em from making any noise when there was Yankees in the neighborhood, or so my mama always told me. Anyway, he took the pitcher off without thanking her, and she just figured she’d never see it again, but at least he didn’t burn the place. The next day one of the niggers found it resting under that big pine that leans out over the dirt road, on a nest of moss, all washed out. We always called it the Yankee pitcher after that.”

He looked at the broken china in his hand, and then out the door of the house and off across the field to the woods, where night was settling down like a cast net.

“He walked home from Appomattox,” he said. “Took him four months. She never knew when to look for him or even if he was coming home. One day, at twilight, she was sitting out on this porch and he just came walking up that cedar avenue and sat down on the porch and leaned against the house and said, ‘What we got left?’ God knows, they didn’t have much, but they had enough to start over again.”

He tossed the scrap of pottery back into the corner, where it rolled crookedly and came to rest against the baseboard.

“They don’t leave you much,” he said.

The muttering army of ghosts suddenly leaped into life as if touched by the very finger of God. A sallow, filthy young soldier walked up an avenue of cedars and she could smell the sweat and dust of his journey; a worn old-young girl lifted callused, broken, sunburnt hands to him and she could taste the salt of her tears. Mike heard living laughter and weeping and the cries of children and animals and the phlegm of deaths; she smelled sweat, dirt, manure, tobacco, roses, pine fires, earth after rain, hay drying sweet in fields, frying meat,
strong lye soap, the melony smell of pig slops and souring buttermilk in the cool morning pantry. The tiny cubicle was alive with people, and they were as densely fleshed and clothed with particularity as the three who had come tonight into this house. At their forefront, a small boy with thistledown hair and light-spilling gray eyes leaped forever from a barn loft into empty, sunshot air, shouting, “Look at me!”

Mike stumbled blindly down the steps of the homeplace and into the cooling air outside. Her head swam; her ears rang with the cacophony of her kinsmen. She barely heard Sam and John Winship come down the ramp behind her. When her head cleared slightly, she turned to her father. She cleared her throat.

“I’d like to help you stuff some envelopes and lick some stamps, if you’ll still have me,” she said.

“Well, I reckon I can find something for you to do,” he said, looking past her to the curve of the distant wooded hill. ‘Mout’s well earn your keep.”

“Mout’s well,” Mike said.

He still did not look at her, and he did not look at her during the long, slow, lurching progress back to the avenue of cedars in the wheelchair, but when Sam helped him from the chair and opened the door of the Cadillac, he laid his hand, as light and scratchy and dry as the talon of a long-dead hawk, on his daughter’s arm, and Mike handed him into the car and closed the door.

They were home before dark.

“W
HAT WAS IT THAT DID THE TRICK?”
S
AM
C
ANADAY
asked, looking at Mike through the wire-rimmed glasses that made his face seem somehow vulnerable and oddly old-fashioned, an earnest, unworldly Victorian assistant master in a barely standard British public school. “I thought we’d get you on our side sooner or later, but I figured you’d put up a bigger fuss than you did. You fell without a shot being fired.”

He had insisted on coming before work the morning after their visit to the homeplace to tell her about the action against the Department of Transportation. She had tried to dissuade him; she still had no interest in the court action and was still reluctant to hear about it. But he had been adamant.

“If you’re going to get involved in it at all, I insist that you know what you’re fighting,” he said. “I won’t butt in after this, but it’s important to me and your dad both that you know.”

So she had agreed. They sat now, drinking coffee and waiting for the sweet rolls he had brought from the all-night Kroger to warm. Outside, early sun was touching the tops of the tallest trees. In his room at the back
of the house, John Winship slept deeply. Mike had not heard him stirring in the night, as she usually did.

“I think it was the old pitcher,” she said, in answer to his question. “That and when he said, ‘They don’t leave you much.’ Somehow I only just then realized how very little he was going to have left if that old horror of a house comes down. And then, it just seemed all of a sudden that … everybody who had lived in that house was real; alive somehow, not just names I’d heard in old family stories. And I could almost see him as a little boy … Oh, I don’t know. I can’t explain it …”

“You don’t have to,” Sam said, grinning faintly. “St. Paul did it for you. Happened to him once, too, on the way to Damascus.”

“I’m really weary of all this biblical crap of yours,” Mike said peevishly. She had not slept well; had fought dreams and shadows all night, and was tired. “I know what an epiphany is. Let’s get on with the Department of Transportation business if we’re going to.”

“Right,” he said, straightening up and pulling a small sheaf of papers toward him. “Well, it started about six months ago. Usually you hear rumors about new roads and things like this, but this time there just weren’t any that anyone around here heard. The Colonel got a letter from one Leonard Tinsley, a DOT Relocation Officer—great term, isn’t it?—saying that the department had acquired property that the homeplace is on the day before, and that all personal property had to be moved out within sixty days. As soon as it was moved, said our Mr. Tinsley, he’d come inspect the property and have your dad sign a claim form and then he’d send it in for payment of $441.84.”

“$441.84!”
Mike was appalled. Surely, the lumber alone was worth that much.

“Of course, it was a ridiculous price,” Sam Canaday said, “and they probably knew it was. You’d be surprised
how often that first offer gets accepted, though. Officialese scares a lot of folks. Well, anyway, he called the number this Tinsley gave him, and Tinsley told him that the state planned to put in an access highway from Carrollton, over at the river in the west, to 1-85 over east yonder. When John said there was already an access not five miles down toward Newman, Tinsley said all he knew was that now there was going to be another one. So the Colonel came to see me, and I contacted Tinsley and objected on the grounds that the offer was not acceptable. And I filed for a writ of injunction and for consequent damages in Superior Court because, of course, without that strip of highway frontage that the house sits on, John couldn’t sell the land for ten cents, or even develop it, if he ever wanted to, or his heirs did. It was all I could do, Mike. There wasn’t anything I could do about the house; there never has been. That was gone the minute he got the letter from Tinsley. But I knew we could delay for quite a while negotiating the price and filing for consequential damages. Of course, the DOT maintained that the so-called improvements—the demolition of the house—would offset any consequential damages that might exist.