On Agate Hill (42 page)

“What happened to us?” I asked next.

“I reckon we nearabout got hit by lightning,” he said. “Iffen we’d of been any closer to that big tree, we’d most likely be dead now.” He gestured toward the mouth of the cave. “Oh God, Molly, this is all my fault. I never should have brung you out here.”

“I came on my own,” I said. “I wanted to.”

“Are you all right then, sure enough? Oh God. I didn’t have no business getting you into something like this.” Jacky sat cross-legged in the rocky dirt with my head in his lap. He pushed my hair back off my face.

It occurred to me to sit up too, and I did, and nothing happened. “I think I am all right,” I said carefully, though my feet and legs were hurting and tingling like when they have been asleep.

Jacky took off his buckskin jacket and put it around me and set in to
picking up wood from the corners of the cave and making a little fire which he got going in no time, he is good at things like that. We sat beside the fire getting warm and watching the firelight flicker on the cave walls. “I have to get back,” I said, but he said, “Wait till it quits raining so hard. It’s going to stop directly.”
How do you know,
I almost said but didn’t. By then I knew better than to ask.

“Looky here.” Jacky moved his hands so that shadow animals went prancing across the red rocky walls of the cave. First a horse, then a deer, then a rabbit chased by a fox. He made animal noises with his mouth. I clapped my hands. “Molly, you swear you’re all right?” He turned back and grabbed my hands.

“Yes,” I said, “far as I can tell. Old Bess always said if you get hit by lightning yet live, you will have special powers,” I told him.

“Well, I reckon we are going to need them,” he said solemnly. We sat side by side leaning up against the cave wall holding hands like children at the end of the world. “I am not a good man,” he said, “but I am not a bad man either, and by God, I’ll be good to you. I swear it.” We sat in silence while the rain gradually stopped and the sun came out again exactly like nothing had ever happened.

But it has, Mary White. It has.

Jacky stood up and stomped out the last of the fire. He helped me outside, steadying me, for at first I could scarcely see. Just when I was about to get scared, my eyes adjusted and then I saw the tallest pine tree blackened and leaning way over to the side, a long open tear down its trunk. While we watched, it cracked in two with a sound like a pistol shot and crashed onto the rocks below, the same rocks where we had been sitting earlier, completely covering up Jacky’s blanket which we had left there, of course. It was a massive tree, its branches covered that whole outcropping. The branches shifted and settled with loud crackling noises.

“Damn,” Jacky finally said when all was quiet again.

“Where is Betty?” I asked, for my legs still had pins and needles as we used to say, and I knew I could never walk all the way back.

Jacky grinned at me. “Don’t worry. Watch this.” He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a shriek that pierced the whole forest. He waited and whistled again and here she came bursting down from the treeline toward us, reins trailing. “Good girl, good girl,” Jacky slapped her glistening wet side. “Well, it looks like I lost a pack someplace,” he said to me. The banjo was still tied on. “But I reckon we are lucky to get off with our lives.”

We were so lucky that I still couldn’t believe it as we rode Betty back up the trail through the dripping laurel and across the Pisgah Bald and on up the road toward Bobcat. I felt like we had been saved for something. Twice Jacky stopped and jumped down to clear the road of fallen branches, for it had stormed heavily up here too. The sun was setting all red through the lacy trees by the time we pulled up in front of the Badgers’ cabin. “They’re not back yet.” I was surprised.

“Chances are, they got rained on too. Who knows? All them Baptists might have got washed right down the river like the great flood.”

“You better go.” I jumped down but had to grab the fence as my knees threatened to buckle under me.

Jacky wheeled Betty around, then reined her in for a minute, both horse and rider black against the fiery sunset, like figures on a magic lantern. “I’ll see you,” is all he said before he rode away, yet those words seemed to enter my body.

I went in and took off my clothes and washed up and dressed again. I couldn’t believe that I had left here only this morning, that I had been gone for only one day. It seemed like years. I opened the pie safe and ate everything I could get my hands on, old biscuits and a big hunk of cake and a handful of dried apples almost too tough to chew. I went out and got more wood for the fire which I had got blazing again by the time they all came trooping in, wet, exhausted, yet excited and full of stories. The storm had hit just as the invitation hymn was offered, according to Chattie, sending tens of people rushing forward to be saved. Agnes winked at me, then stared at me curiously. “What did you do all day, Molly?” she asked. “You look, I don’t know, different.”

“I went walking, and got rained on too,” I said. Just then Granny Took
made a snorting, strangling noise, so we all rushed over to her bedside where she was clutching her coverlet hard as she could with both little hands, her mouth working furiously. Yet no words came.

“Why, what is it?” Chattie cried. “Has she been all right today?” and I said, “She has been just fine.”

I went off to my leanto with her little black eyes following me, hot and intense as coals.

WEDNESDAY

Today I was walking the Indian trail home from the Bobcat School alone — Agnes has gone down to Jefferson with Cicero Todd to pick up supplies — when out of the woods popped Jacky Jarvis. The sun came down through the trees, lighting up his hair. He was hatless and shirt-sleeved, as if he had joined up with spring. And I have to say that after all that has happened, I wasn’t even surprised to see him, though I
acted
surprised.

“Why, what are you doing down here?” I asked. “Don’t you have a job?”

“This here is my job,” he said, falling right into step beside me. “I am getting to know you.”

“Oh, you are!” I said, and he said, “Yes mam,” which I hate, and said so, and then he walked me on home talking a mile a minute through these woods which are more beautiful right now than they have ever been. All the leaves are coming out now, with fiddlehead ferns popping and the May apples and bloodroot blooming. Two bluebirds flew through the trees keeping just ahead of us, I’ll swear it was the same bluebirds though I didn’t mention it, rattling on about my students and what all had happened that day in school.

But “Looky there!” Jacky said, pointing at them. “I reckon I am getting to know them too.”

I had just started to say something else when I saw a flash of white moving on up the trail, and somehow I knew it was somebody’s shirt. “Jacky,” I turned to whisper, but he was already gone, vanished entirely into the forest
as if he had never been, leaving me alone on the trail yet burning as if with a fever.

“Good afternoon, Miss Molly,” said Horace Groats, awkward as ever, carrying a sack of coal down to the school, for which I thanked him kindly.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON AT THE BOBCAT SCHOOL

Today Felix came up to school bringing an “urgent” letter from Henderson’s mother. I opened it on the spot. She wants to know my measurements, wondering if I can fit into her own wedding dress. “Isn’t that sweet?” Agnes said. She is going to measure me tonight.

FRIDAY

Jacky came again

SATURDAY

And again, he says he is camping out like an Indian in a hollow tree down toward the river

SUNDAY NIGHT

Today I walked right out attracting no suspicion as the house was full of visitors, Badger cousins and such, everybody was eating cobbler. The weather has not changed yet, it is still pretty, the prettiest spring I can ever remember. The river shone like a distant mirror through the trees as I started down the path which I was not sure of, afraid I would get lost, and this is when I thought I saw your little red coat just ahead of me, Mary White, flitting through the trees, showing me the way. I walked faster and you walked faster. I know I can never catch you. But I was just so happy to see you, all the same. I was out of breath when I finally spotted the tree where he emerged like a forest sprite, grinning and waving, and then I started running down the hill toward him, I couldn’t help it, and he ran out to meet me and picked me up and squeezed me, hard, and carried me into the tree where he had made a kind of nest with the thick leaves covered by a beautiful old quilt. “That’s a
wedding ring quilt,” I said, and he said, “Is it?” and we fell down upon it. We stayed there all afternoon, Mary White, and I would be there still, but he woke me up saying, “Molly! Molly, you have to go home.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes mam.”

“Don’t call me that.” I put on my clothes one piece at a time as slow as I could, watching his face all the while. You could never say Jacky is good looking, but I think he is beautiful.

“You better get a move on, girl,” he said.

I stood up and pulled on my skirt.

“Take me with you,” I said.

“I can’t take you up there, crazy girl. Besides, he would come after you.” Now Jacky was walking back and forth in front of the hollow tree, in and out of the sunlight, very agitated.

Jacky does not know that this is not true, because Henderson Hanes has never yet done one hard thing in his life.

Simon Black is the one who would come after me.

Jacky kept walking back and forth, then stopped right in front of me. He took both my hands in his. “Well Molly, I’d still like to get to know you, but I reckon I’m going to have to marry you to do it.”

I looked up at him. The sun was in his hair, and on my face. “All right,” I said.

At last this is my own true love story, for you, Mary White, though I will remain forever your own

Molly

Plain View

STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, WILKES COUNTY

This testimony made this 18th day of November 1907, by John Howard Willetts, aka “BJ” aka “Black Jack” Jarvis. Duly sworn before Coroner George Ragland, at Wilkesboro, and state of North Carolina.

YES
, I
WILL SWEAR
it on this Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I swear to God. May God strike me dead if this ain’t the truth. She never done it. Molly Petree could not have done this thing if her life depended on it, which I reckon it does. But this is the truth, and the whole truth insofar as I know it, and I know more about it than anybody else in the world, for I was right there. I been right there all along. And it may be that Jacky Jarvis has had a bullet out there waiting for him all along too. Well I’m telling you whether it’s necessary or not, it’s the truth.

Start at the beginning? All right, I’ll start at the beginning. But what is it? When did the beginning start? Did it start way back when me and Jacky was born six days apart to two sisters, and both of us named Jack? And him light complected and me dark, so that they took to calling us Yellow Jack and Black Jack right off the bat, for nicknames? Or did it start when I was two and Mama pitched forward in the fire carrying me, and you can see here what happened. Just go on and take a good look. Mama’s own face was disfigured so bad that she never would let nobody see it but me, she got herself a black bonnet with a black veil, and walked with her head down. Daddy took off soon after, he was not from around here anyway. Come through selling sewing machines.

Well, Big Jack taken us in, that was Big Jack Jarvis, Jacky’s daddy, and they all nursed Mama until her death which was not long in coming, and
raised me like a son. So you see, sir, Jacky and me goes as far back as it gets. We were brothers, and more than brothers. He was like my other half.

When I first seen Molly? Jacky come riding up here with her, acrost the Rag Mountain bald. We can see folks coming from a long ways off. Now we live right out in the open, and the wind blows up here all the time, and there’s a lot of folks that can’t stand a wind like that, it will make them kindly nervous, and crazy-like. Why our uncle Calvin got himself the prettiest little redheaded wife one time, he found her over on Knox Creek, singing in a tavern. Anyhow, Calvin brung her up here, but she didn’t stay no time, this wind gave her conniptions, she said, so she lit a rag for home. Then he got himself another one, now that’s Clara, she’s still here, a different kind of a woman entirely, she can work all day and then sit so still in one of them flour sack dresses, she looks like a sack of flour herself. That’s the kind of woman you want up here, a woman that has got some gravity to her, so she won’t blow off.

But Molly Petree is not that kind of a woman. No sir.

So when I first seen Jacky riding her acrost the mountain on that big horse of his, I thought, Well this ain’t one for the books neither, I reckon, though she was the prettiest one yet, the prettiest one that had ever been brung up here, and just laughing to beat the band. Well, they was both of them laughing so hard, they liked to fell off of the horse. The porch was full of people, it being payday down at the mill, and the lot was full of horses and wagons and mules, with some men pitching horseshoes over at the side there, and everybody that was watching set up a holler.

BJ, BJ, come looky here, said Clara, and Calvin’s little Jacob, and so I put down the hoop cheese after I finished cutting it, and stood back in the doorway wiping my hands on my apron, watching Jacky and her come acrost the bald. Jacky rode the horse right in among everybody, making a big commotion, the way he will.

BJ! Jacky hollered at the top of his lungs, BJ, get yourself out here! I have done it! I have gone and got me a wife.

Oh Lord, I thought. I reckon we are in for it now.

Because the truth is, and everybody around here knows it, Jacky Jarvis was not the marrying kind. Now I am his first cousin, and I growed up side by side with him closer than a brother, and I know him through and through, better than anybody. Jacky does not mean to be bad, but the fact is, he just loves women, the way he loves music and liquor and cards and traveling, why he wants everything there is, and he don’t see any reason why he can’t have it, either. Now you wouldn’t think a woman would want a man like that, you would think they would rather have somebody reliable, such as myself, but they don’t.