On Agate Hill (46 page)

We all thought the rolling store was a crazy idea when Jacky first come up with it. Fact is, it was a good business decision. Damn good. Jacky hit the road and done great with it. Came back empty every time. Sold out. Me and Molly and Calvin kept on running the store, and Molly run the storehouse school too, in the mornings, and everybody loved her. Time passed as it will. Grandaddy Roscoe died, Aunt Luvenie died, God bless her. Biddle and Betsy had twins. Boys.

Molly had another boy herself, Washington, born dead three years after Mary Agnes, and another baby born real soon after that, and not natural. Not normal. Named her Eliza. Molly grieved so, and wouldn’t let hardly anybody see that baby, but I seen her, poor little thing, and laid her out myself and then buried her up in the row. Put a rock on her grave the same as Washington and Junius. It had got to where it didn’t seem right to let Mister Crabtree carve a stone for every one of them, and Jacky claimed there was no point in naming them anyway. Jacky himself would not take any part in naming them. But Molly insisted, and swore they could not go to Heaven without a name, I don’t know where she got that from. She named every one of them.

Anyway, this time it was summer, and Jacky was drunk when we done it. Calvin and Biddle were holding him up by the shoulders on each side.

Looky here what a fine crop of babies I’m a raising, he said. Like cabbages all in a row.

You bastard, said Molly, shaking all over, leaning on me.

Jacky took off with the rolling store the minute we got down off the mountain and did not come back for a month and a half. Molly stayed in the bed for the longest time with her face turned to the wall, and would not even get up when Miss Agnes came to see her. Mister Black sent the Indian up here to inquire about her. But it seemed like it taken her longer and longer to get over it, ever time.

It was to happen once more, now that was Fannie, born Christmas Day 1900, you could not even hardly call that one a baby. And then that was the
end of it. Just a row of rock babies up on the mountain like a little stone wall, and a husband with a red bow tie that had took up traveling in a rolling store, and a pretty wife alone on a windy bald. Well she wasn’t really alone. Not strictly. For I was there too, right along, and the rest of us, and half the county still coming up here for the dances. But the situation of it, see, was what caught people’s fancy, for people are interested in other people’s business anyway, and so of course there was a lot of talk.

All kinds of stories started up about the two of them, as stories naturally will, kind of like that old love vine that grows all over Rag Mountain, it comes back every year, and you can’t kill it. It was said that Jacky was mean to Miss Molly, as they all called her by then, and that he just liked to run around and never wanted no babies in the first place, and that he beat her to make her lose them. I am here to tell you, this was not true. Jacky loved her. And he mourned those babies something terrible and hollered from mountain to mountain every time she lost one. Other folks said she didn’t want them, and done things to herself to get rid of them, and this is the meanest tale of all. I don’t know what is wrong with people, to start such stuff as that. I reckon they have not got enough to do, or they have just got to believe that somebody else someplace is worse off than they are.

The only part of them stories that was true was the part about Jacky running around on her, a thing he could not help, it seemed, for he was bound to be a traveling man. I knew it, and it may be that Molly knew it, but I could not tell you that for sure. There’s things a person can not bear to know. You can’t never tell who somebody will love, you know, nor how fierce they can be about it. What I do believe is that she loved him anyway and could not stand to lose him. If she knowed anything about any other women, such as Ruby Coldiron or Icy Hinshaw, she did not let on. She kept cheerful, and held her head up with a smile. And every time he came home, she was always so glad to see him. She’d run out the door to fling herself on him and hug him, and Jacky he done the same, swinging her around in a big circle and kissing her in front of anybody, even at their age. For we was all getting on a
little, you know. But Jacky always thought she hung the moon, and he loved her something terrible.

Now I kept a pretty close track of this myself, for I was watching over her, in my way, same as I always watched over Swannie and Miss Luvenie and Aunt Belle. I had to. Wasn’t nobody else up there to do it.

Well, for an instance, I’d take me a walk around the place every night, pretty late, just checking on things. A patrol, you might say. Seeing that all them women was asleep and the horses was put up and the doors was latched and what-not, and I have to tell you, it was not a month before the end that I seen Molly and Jacky out waltzing on their porch in the middle of the night, him singing something into her ear. I couldn’t hardly hear him, but she could hear him. And the moon so bright, you could see them as plain as day, swooping all around real graceful-like. I can’t tell you how I felt, standing there in the shadows while they was dancing. And this was no time atall before it happened. Whatever that spark was between the two of them, it did not go out, not even after they got done farming that crop of stone babies.

So there is no way that she could have killed him. No sir. That is all talk, just a story, told by fools. I ought to know. I was right there.

N
OW THERE WAS ONE
time not long before it happened that Icy Hinshaw come up to the store herself. It was a dark afternoon with a cold mean kind of a rain. Somebody had drove her up here in a wagon, some man, but I couldn’t see who it was for the rain.

Can I help you? Molly went toward her when the bell rang and the door opened.

I come around the counter as quick as I could, as soon as I seen who it was.

She stood just inside and took off her wet scarf and shook her head like an animal so that her red hair sprung up and then settled all around her shoulders. She was wearing an old brown coat, a man’s coat, which came down to her shoes. Old shoes, I noticed. Wore out. Now you could never say Icy Hinshaw was a pretty woman, not with that sharp nose and sharp
chin and those sunk-down pale gray eyes. White eyes, almost. But there was something about her, for a fact. I remembered back when we was all young, and she’d run with the rest of them, and fiddle like a fool, all night long. She was a match for Jacky, sure enough.

I walked over to where she stood ignoring Molly.

Well Lord, if it ain’t old BJ. Icy grinned the lopsided grin I remembered, so that just for a minute, she was beautiful. How are you doing, you old ugly thing?

Just fine, I said. It’s good to see you, Icy. What can we do for you?

I’m looking for Jacky, she said.

He’s not here, Molly spoke up quite plainly, like a schoolteacher talking to children.

You sure? You sure you ain’t got him hid back there someplace? Icy squinted at us.

I am afraid not. Molly smiled at her. He’s over in Tennessee with the rolling store.

Either Molly had turned into the best liar in the world, or she truly didn’t know a thing. It was a curious moment as they stood there looking at each other in the dim gray light of that dark afternoon.

Maybe I can help you out, Icy, I said. Come on back here with me. I reckon this is something about that timber lease your daddy has up on the mountain, I said, making something up. She followed me back over to the counter where I gave her some money and some all-day suckers for the kids. I knew she would not have come up to Plain View unless she was desperate.

Molly busied herself with sweeping up, and then went over to stand on the cold porch and watch the wagon move across the bald and out of sight.

I came up behind her and put my arms around her waist and my face — my face — in her hair which smelled like lavender. Molly — I started, determined to say it all then, finally.

Oh BJ, she said, breaking my hold. She turned to face me. You know you will always be my best friend in the world. She stood up on tiptoe to kiss me, just once, on the mouth, then pulled back and put her finger to my lips the
way you would shush a child, and ran down the steps and across the wagon yard to their house through the rain without her cloak.

So I
WAS SURPRISED
, to tell you the truth, when she asked me to take her over there right after the funeral which we held ourselves, up on the mountain where we buried him. Preacher Livesay had offered to come and preach, now that is the one Jacky jumped on, but Biddle just grinned and told him, Not hardly. If Jacky didn’t want you up here when his baby died, he don’t want you up here now. We turned down Felix Boykin and Reverend Graebner from down in Jefferson too. We bury our own, said Uncle Hat, who run the thing, and so we did. Grandaddy Roscoe would have liked it, he believed in the family doing for themselves and staying to themselves. So they tuned up and played “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” and “Angel Band,” Jacky’s favorites. It was a hot sunny day in August — dog days, it was — with a little wind blowing across the black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace and daisies that grow all around in the burying ground up there, flowers so thick on the ground that you couldn’t hardly see some of them little baby rocks there in the row. Big spiky thistles and purple phlox. Orange and black butterflies everyplace.

Molly wore a bright blue satin dress, blue as the sky. Clara had tried to argue her out of it earlier, saying it was not a proper dress to wear to a funeral. I don’t care, Molly told her. Jacky bought me this dress, and he liked it, and I am wearing it. Molly could be as stubborn as anybody when she took a mind to. She stood with her straw hat in her hands while the wind pulled at her yellow hair. I swear, she still looked like a girl, at least to me, like the very girl she was when she come riding acrost the bald with Jacky all those years ago.

At the end, she would not leave but stood to watch them shovel on the dirt with no change in her fierce bright face, though those around were crying. It was hard for us to lose Jacky, you know, even if he drove you crazy half the time, you had to love him. You had to enjoy him. It was hard to take in that he was gone for good. It was like somebody had blowed out the sun in the middle of the day. For I had always felt that Jacky was my brother, but closer than a brother. My other half.

BJ, Molly said to me while they was doing it, I don’t know if I can stand this. I don’t know if I can live without him or not. And the truth was, I didn’t know if she could, neither.

Then all of a sudden at the very end Molly ran forward then stumbled and knelt down by the side of the grave, scooping up the dirt with her hand. She pressed it to her mouth and kissed it, then threw it on the grave. Goodbye honey, she said real clear, so all could hear her. Several people gasped. Molly bowed her head. When she got up and walked away, her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and dirt had got on her skirt too.

Now you tell me, you reckon she would have done that if she had killed him?

Molly held up her head looking neither right nor left when we come out into the open and saw that crowd of people stretched across the bald — Lord, it was the awfullest number of folks gathered up there you ever seen, there was even more of them by then than there was when we had left carrying Jacky, or what was left of Jacky, which was not much. We had not let nobody see the body. It must have been three hundred people up there.

Cousin Percy Allgood had not moved a muscle. He was still standing right there where the path goes into the woods, holding his rifle over his shoulder, staring down at the crowd so that no one would have thought of following us. Ernest Dollar and Jubal Smith stood beside him, and General Gentry with tears running down his face.

They took off their hats when we started coming out of the woods one by one, and the whole crowd stopped what they was doing and went silent. I swear, you could hear the wind through the balsams despite of all the people. Then Molly stepped out, and they all went Aaah as one. Some people leapt to their feet while others craned their necks, it seemed they all had to get a good look at her. They had been gathering for days, growing in number ever since the fire. You would think that they had never seen a fire before. Of course they had been going through the ashes with a fine tooth comb too, taking everything they could find that was any use to them, which was precious little.

Will the circle be unbroken bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye?
There’s a better home a-waiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky

Biddle started singing as we walked on down to the store, or where the store used to be, and all took it up as we walked along, stopping to shake hands and hug people, Molly too. Seemed like everybody wanted to touch her, for a fact, and stroke that shiny blue dress, kind of like Christabel used to stroke the edge of her little blanket. Everybody wanted to say they had been there and seen her, I reckon. Everybody we knew, everybody that had traded in the store or danced on top of it. It made me sick, to tell you the truth. This whole thing makes me sick. People can act so nice, bringing food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

Finally I got her back over there in the house. I thought she would want to lay down, and I was prepared to sit on the porch and keep folks away for the rest of the night if need be, seeing as I couldn’t run the store no more. I had thought it all out ahead of time. I was going to guard her from everybody.

But Molly fooled me.

The first thing she done was get a jar of Jacky’s corn liquor and pour out two glasses of it. One for her and one for me. She tossed her head back and drank hers down, while I sipped at mine.

BJ, she said, I want you to take me over there.

Over where? I asked.

You know, she said, looking me straight in the eye.

I did. I waited while she changed clothes, and then we slipped out the back door. I made to harness the mule but she said, No, I can ride, so I saddled the horses instead. I want to ride Jupiter, she said. That was Jacky’s horse.