On Agate Hill (41 page)

I jumped up and screamed bloody murder.

“Lord God, you’ll raise the dead,” he said, which was exactly what I wanted to do suddenly, scream and holler and raise the dead. I felt like I was tingling from head to toe.

“Where’d they all go?” he asked. “I passed them on the road coming.”

“To the protracted meeting,” I said. “It will last all day.” Then I could have bit off my tongue.

“It will, huh?” He ran his fingers down my damp hair. “Well, that’s good, then. How come you didn’t go to church with the rest of them? What are you, a heathen girl?”

“I’m sick,” I said.

“That’s too bad. I reckon I’ll just have to hold church for you right here then.” He nodded at Granny Took. “Who is that? She can come to my church too.” He was still touching my hair.

“I don’t know if you’ll let me into your church,” I said. “I’m a bad girl.”

“There ain’t no such of a thing in my church,” he said.

“What’s the name of your church?” I asked.

“It’s the Jacky Jarvis Church of Love and Light and Redemption for All,” he said. “I’ll preach to you, sing to you, and save you too. Everybody gets saved in my church. You’re welcome any time.” Now he pulled up another chair and straddled it and sat facing me. “That ain’t such a joke. I’m supposed to be playing gospel music right now, over in Bee Gum with the rest of them. We’ve got a little gospel group, well actually it’s the same one as you heard up at Merle’s place, me and granddaddy and Biddle, that’s my nephew. We’re the Rag Mountain Ramblers on Saturday night, the Angel Band on Sundays.”

“Don’t you get confused?” I asked.

“Not hardly.” He grinned. “Matter of fact, I just quit playing a while ago, up on Rip Shin. Ain’t even been to bed yet.”

“Aren’t you sleepy, then?”

“I figure I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he said. “The way I’m going, it won’t be long neither. But that’s all right, I never figured on getting old, anyway. I ain’t got a plan for it.” Close up, he has these sort of hazel eyes with shiny gold circles inside them, around the pupil. I have never seen anything like them. “I wouldn’t mind some of that coffee, though.” He gestured to the stove where it was still hot.

I got up and got him some. “So when does your church start?”

“Right now.” He took a big drink of coffee and leaned his head back and closed his eyes and started right in singing “There’s Going to Be a Meeting in the Air” at the top of his lungs, startling me. “How did you like that, Granny?” he said when he was done.

To my surprise the tears were running down her knotted old apple face. When he sang “I’ll Fly Away” she beat out the time on the side of the bed with her little claw hand.

“She’s having a big time, ain’t she?” Jacky said when he was through.

She was, but I was not, thinking what would happen if somebody came. And anybody might — Chattie leaves the door open all the time, with friends and neighbors always welcome.

“It’s too pretty of a day to stay in the house,” Jacky said, like he could read
my mind. “Let’s go someplace. Don’t never stay inside if you can stay outside, that’s my motto.”

I was relieved. “Let me just get her some food, then,” I said.

Jacky whipped out a harmonica and played “Amazing Grace” on it for Granny Took while I cut up some johnnycake into little bitty pieces and put them on her blue plate and poured some buttermilk over it. I have not heard anybody play a harmonica like that since Spencer at Uncle Junius’s bedside, and all of a sudden I was crying because that time came flooding back to me, and the music was so beautiful, and because I missed Spence so much. I guess I always will.

Jacky Jarvis put the harmonica back in his pocket and came over to touch my wet cheek with his finger. He has real long fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I said, grabbing up my cloak.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, “and don’t never apologize for a thing, that’s my motto too. Hit’s a lot to cry about in this world, a vale of tears as the feller said. Come on now. Bye-bye, honey,” he said to Granny Took, who stared at us with her dark button eyes all the way out the door.

Outside, it was a windy, changeable morning. I hoped it would stay dry for the Association meeting and then I didn’t think about the Association meeting anymore as Jacky took my arm and escorted me down off the porch real formal, like we were sashiating in a square dance. His brown horse Betty was tied to a tree in the woods, pack and banjo slung on behind. “Can you ride behind me?” he asked. “Can you jump up?”

“Bring her over here by the fence,” I said, and I jumped up easy as pie and then we were off, I never thought to ask where we were going. Jacky Jarvis was skinny as could be, underneath that buckskin jacket. My arms went all the way around him. “Oh do you remember sweet Betsy from Pike?” he sang as we trotted back down the road to Jefferson. The wind blew my hair dry. A pair of bluebirds flew in and out of the fencerow ahead of us. Suddenly I didn’t even care who heard him singing, or who saw us riding along, because by then it had become perfectly clear to me that I am not going to marry Henderson Hanes, no matter what else happens.

Jacky pulled at the reins and we turned off Pisgah Ridge Road. “Whoa now,” he told Betty as she picked her way down a steep trail through thick mountain laurel, a trail I had never noticed before in all my three years of traveling that road to town. It was like going down a tunnel. We went a long way. Finally we came to a windy open field of blue trillium sloping down toward two tall pine trees and a rocky outcropping at the edge of the mountain. I have never seen anything so beautiful.

“Did you know this was here?” I called over the wind, and he hollered back that he remembered it from when he was little. “They call it Bone Valley,” he said, “and over there is Manbone Rock.” He pointed to a huge white rock which stood alone on its little hill. It was as big as a cabin.

“Why in the world do they call it
that?
” I asked him.

“I have heard it said that they found a man’s bones up on top of it, long time ago. Of course they’s a tale about everything.” He stopped to grin at me. “We used to run these hills like bird dogs, me and BJ.”

“Who’s BJ?” I asked.

“BJ’s my cousin,” he said, helping me down. “You’ll meet him directly.”

“Well, I doubt that,” I said.

Jacky just grinned at me, clicking to the horse as he led her down toward the rocks. The wind blew all around us, whipping my skirts and rippling the trillium. It reminded me of that line from the song,
Bow down ladies, bow down
.

“Whoa now.” Jacky stopped at an outcropping of big white boulders that looked like playing blocks abandoned by some giant child. He took a rolled-up green blanket off the back of Betty’s saddle and spread it out on one of the rocks to make a kind of bench, with another rock for us to lean against, while I stood looking off down the mountain toward Jefferson, or where I thought Jefferson ought to be. Hawks dipped and wheeled through the wide blue air. Nothing looked familiar to me. I felt like I was in another country. We were not on a cliff exactly, just a rocky point that the land fell away from in scrub brush. I felt funny out in the open like that, without the sheltering trees I had gotten so used to at Chattie’s and the Bobcat School and even down in town,
surrounded as it is by the mountains, like a town in the bottom of a teacup. Here I felt exposed, and a little bit afraid, and nervous.
Anybody could see us,
I thought, though I knew that nobody would. For a minute I thought I could hear their voices in the wind, singing church songs.

Jacky took my hand and sat me down on the green blanket, then sat Indian-style across from me, cocking his head like a gawky bird. He makes me laugh, Mary White.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Then he leaned forward and put his mouth on my mouth, just lightly, once. He didn’t touch any other part of my body.

“Now,” he said. “Start talking. I want to know all about you. I want to know everything.”

“First, I am engaged to be married,” I said.

“I don’t care nothing about that,” he said. “That don’t mean nothing to me. Where did you come from, anyway? What are you doing up here?”

So I started talking, slowly at first, then in a big rush like a creek running down off a mountain. I told him about Mama and Papa and the War and Spencer and Uncle Junius and Selena, and about going to the Gatewood Academy. I got hot and threw off my cloak, still talking. He nodded, chewing on a long piece of straw like an animal. I kept on talking. He acted like he had all the time in the world. So I kept on talking. I told him all about Agnes, and Chattie, and the Bobcat School, and Cicero Todd and the gun. He kept breaking in, asking more questions.

I feel like I have known him all my life.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said, despite the fact that the changeable weather was suddenly changing fast, the sun entirely gone now beneath a pile of gray clouds that were fast moving in from the west. I put my cloak back on and hugged it around myself.

“Me and my cousin, we run a store up on top of Rag Mountain. You can spit off the porch and hit Tennessee. We hold dances on top of the store. Daddy built it for that. But Mama don’t dance, nor play music no more either,
she’s been crazy ever since the War and all the terrible things they done to her . . .” Jacky talked up a blue streak. He talked more in one afternoon than Henderson Hanes has talked in all the time I have known him. Jacky said they have about twenty family members living up at Plain View, “give or take some at any given time,” and “some several” of them play music. Jacky himself started in on the piano at age two or three, taught by his uncle Blind Bill, who tuned pianos for a living, and played at dances. Jacky’s mama played piano too, or used to, before the Home Guard came upon her when she was out washing clothes and tried to make her tell where Jacky’s daddy and his uncle had hidden out, plunging her hands down into the boiling water when she refused. They hanged her from a sycamore tree too, but let her down before she died. She never told. “She hasn’t never been the same since,” Jacky said, and I said I’d imagine not. When the War was over, Jacky’s daddy found the men that had tortured her, and killed them both — shot one man while he was out plowing in his cornfield, picked him off from the edge of the woods, and shot the other man as he came out of church with his wife on his arm. Big Jack Jarvis was never prosecuted for these murders, as there were no witnesses, and everybody figured they had it coming. He had gone on to live a long life, running the store and playing music.

Jacky had learned the banjo from an uncle who had learned it from a negro just before the War. He said his uncle traded a coon dog to the negro for the banjo, and called it his “coon dog banjo” ever after, playing it for years.

I started laughing, though thunder rolled in the distance.

“I want to go up there,” I said, which I did, all of a sudden, more than anything. “I want to go dancing on top of the store.”

“No mam,” he said.

“Don’t call me mam,” I said immediately.

“Plain View ain’t no place for a lady like you.”

“I am not a real lady,” I said.

“You’re a schoolteacher, ain’t you? You look like a lady to me. Shoot, you have even been to lady school.”

“Well, maybe it didn’t take,” I said.

“Iffen it did or iffen it didn’t, it sounds to me like you are fixing to be a real grand lady yourself soon enough.”

“I’m not a lady.” I don’t know why I started crying. “I’m not a ghost girl either.”

“Well, you sure as hell got that right.” He pinched my waist. “You feel pretty solid to me.”

The wind was blowing like crazy now. Jacky’s horse whinnied and stomped her feet.

“Then take me up there.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

“Shoot, honey, I couldn’t do that.”

“Chicken!” I let go of his hand and jabbed him in the side. “Fraidy-cat! Fraidy-cat! Don’t know where his tail is at!” This is what the children sing at the Bobcat School. I pushed him as hard as I could and then he pinned my arms behind me and I twisted him off of the rock onto the ground and together we rolled over and over down the steep hill through the scratchy weeds and sage grass. By the time we fetched up against another big rock, I had gotten to laughing too hard to quit.

“Shoot, you’re a crazy girl, aren’t you, you know that?” Jacky spoke in bursts, breathing hard.

We both lay on our backs, exhausted. But now the sky had turned dark. The light all around us was a pale, sickly green. A long deep roll of thunder, like a growl, came crawling across the sky, soon followed by a jagged bolt of lightning back up at the tree line not far away. Jacky’s horse reared up, whinnying.

“Hellfire,” he said, jumping up and pulling me after him. “Come on, I’ve got to turn her loose, and then we’ll go over there and get up under the Manbone Rock, there is kind of an overhang if I remember right. Hit’s fixing to come a big one.”

The wind was against us as we struggled back up the hill. I waited while Jacky went over to the horse, still tied to the tallest pine. “Whoa, Betty, whoa, Betty,” he said, but Betty kept on rearing up, her eyes rolling. She pulled her lips back so I could see her gums and her long yellow teeth. “Damn, Betty!”
Finally Jacky got her untied and gave her her head and she galloped back up the hill snorting toward the woods.

“Oh no, Jacky —,” I cried, but he hollered, “Don’t worry, she will come back,” and I had to believe him.

“Now come on.” He grabbed my hand as we ran hell for leather back up the hill toward the Manbone Rock which loomed up white and ghostly as a galleon in the dark stormy afternoon. Thunder boomed. We scrabbled up the hill, falling back again and again as the little loose rocks rolled under our feet. I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you run and run but you don’t ever get anywhere. Jacky was pulling my hand. We had gotten almost to the rock when there came a sharp crack, as loud as a firing squad, which threw us both to the ground.

And then the first thing I knew, Jacky was leaning over me saying something. I could scarcely see him in the gray light which was all around us now, and scarcely hear him for the ringing sound in my ears. My mouth tasted coppery, like pennies. “Where are we?” I asked, and he said we were up under the Manbone Rock, and the storm was passing. Then it seemed like my eyes started working again and I saw the wide oval mouth of the cave and the gray slanting rain outside.