On Agate Hill (50 page)

“Alice,” he whispered.

“No. It is Molly,” I said. “Her daughter.”

“Of course. Mrs. Jarvis,” he said, holding out his arms in the white flowing shirt, an entirely unexpected gesture. He looked like a saint in a stained-glass window. “Welcome. I had hoped to see you again.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I would have come sooner, if I had known. I don’t believe that I have ever thanked you properly for what you have done for me over the years. For us,” I said, meaning Jacky and everyone up at Plain View.

“It has been my pleasure,” he said, “as well as my obligation. Fulfilling an obligation is the greatest pleasure a man like myself can take, so it is I who should be thanking you.” This speech seemed to exhaust him, but before I could suggest that he sit back down, an extraordinary little personage darted past me and slipped under Simon Black’s shoulder to support him.

At first I thought it was a girl, then a boy — then a child — then with a start I realized it was a grown man, though it was very hard to tell. He was
quite short in stature, with short arms and stocky legs, like a baby doll or a gingerbread man. He had an unusually large round head covered all over by dark curls, and a round swarthy face with round eyes veiled by a kind of white film, like cotton. His eyes were shocking.

“Why, who in the world is this?” I cried — and he turned his head toward me, cocking it like a robin, the huge white eyes unblinking. I realized he was blind. Later I would learn that he is not totally blind, for he can see light, and distinguish movement. His hearing is extraordinary. That day, the day of my arrival, he wore muddy boots — the entire floor was muddy — and torn work jeans and Uncle Junius’s old burgundy velvet smoking jacket which hung down to his knees.

“This is my little man,” Simon Black said, my old fear of him falling away entirely in that instant.

“But who
is
he?” I asked.

“Selena’s son. He has lived on this place all his life. His name is Juney.”

“For Junius?” I asked.

“His full name is Solomon Junius Hall,” Simon Black said, and Juney smiled at the sound of his name, a smile of incredible sweetness, like a small child. Now I remembered Selena’s yellow vomit in the snow, how she had said, “You will have one yourself sometime,” and how small her baby was, and how he had cried and cried.

I stepped closer.

“Hello Juney,” I said. “I am Molly.”

“Molly,” he said like a parrot, still smiling, his blank eyes trained upon my face.

“Molly Petree,” I said.

“Molly Petree,” he said, then ran his hands quickly all over my face with the lightest skittering touch, like a hummingbird. I found myself closing my eyes, just for a second, giving myself over to it. I swayed and nearly fell. I felt entirely refreshed when I came back to myself.

“How long will you be with us, then? I am afraid that our accommodations —”
Simon Black said, and I saw with a start that tears stood in his eyes. “That is, we have no accommodations. We are here only briefly. But pardon me, you must be exhausted. I am not sure what we have in the way of food, either —”

“Oh, nevermind.” I took off my cloak. “I am a pretty fair cook myself. Surely we will find something. Henry, take my bag up wherever you can find a bed in one piece. And Juney, you come with me.”

He turned his sweet radiant face back and forth between us in a question.

“To the kitchen,” I said. “You will show me,” and Simon Black, now settled again in his chair, gave him a little shove.

Thus we went out, me with my hand on Juney’s solid shoulder, fingering the soft velvet, through the dark cold passage to a tiny ramshackle kitchen, indescribably filthy and cluttered, which had been built onto the platform at the back of the house. Whatever Henry’s skills might be as a servant, apparently they did not extend to kitchen work. Liddy’s old kitchen house stood abandoned in the back, its door ajar.

“Wood,” I said to Juney, who showed me the woodbox. I started stuffing sticks into the stove. I pulled open a pantry door at random. “Where is —” I turned to ask Juney, but he had disappeared. I wondered — as I have often wondered since — if I would ever see him again. I found a pan, a pile of china plates, a big wooden bowl, two crystal goblets, and an old tin cup. Then suddenly there was Juney balancing a slab of bacon, a cabbage with the dirt still attached, and an apple pie, grinning his big grin. It was a perfect apple pie. I couldn’t imagine where he had gotten it. It was as if he had produced it out of thin air, by magic. I clapped my hands. “Perfect!” I said. “This is wonderful!”

Juney put everything down on the table, and clapped his hands too.

•  •  •

May 2, 1927

That was twenty years ago, Dear Diary.

Are you surprised, old friend?

I’m still here, like Aunt Mitty who came to take supper with Mama Marie and never left, and for the same reason. Need is a powerful thing for a woman, maybe the most powerful thing that there is.

I have waited twenty years to come back into this cubbyhole, years which have passed in the twinkling of an eye, as in the Bible. But now the time has come for me to tell the rest of the story, for it is a love story too, as are all stories, in the end.

The time has come, and Juney knows it too, though we do not speak of these things.

The old green dress which hides the entrance to this cubbyhole fell apart at my touch — disintegrated! Oh now it is certainly time. I ducked through the low door feeling that I too might explode. Yet it was not as hard as you might think for I am such a little old woman now. I have shrunk to the size of a child again, I can still sit here in my fairy tale chair, and you may take Willie’s little white chair, which you will remember. I had another friend too once, her name was Mary White, do you recall? But she is gone now, off into the world of light. Oh it was all so long ago. And yet here is that bad girl Molly stuck forever in this notebook, bursting from its pages. I thought I would not know her anymore, and yet I find that I am her, just as wild and full of spite and longing as ever, as I still am. For an old woman is like a child, but more than a child, for I know what I know yet I feel exactly the same in my heart. These young girls don’t know that, do they? It would surprise them. But that thing does not wear out, I could tell them. I could tell those girls a thing or two.

Oh I know what they say about me in town. I know I am old and sick. Yet inside I am just the same and I’ll swear it, still crazy with love and pain, still wanting who knows what. I am not sure whatever happened to that smart girl in between, the one who kept the Bobcat School and worked at
the store wrapping parcels and adding up sums in her head. It seems like only yesterday that she walked out the door and got lost someplace down that old Indian trail.

But I would do it all again, every bit of it, I would lose him again just to have him again for an hour, for a minute, for even a second. I would do it all again just to see his face. My demon lover my Jacky boy my husband sometimes I think I dreamed you up.

Oh Molly Petree, who were you? Strange and willful child

This is the box of her life

This is her diary

In fact everything in this cubbyhole is exactly the same, like the village in the paperweight Ben Valiant gave me so long ago, I don’t know where that has got to now. I believe I left it at Chattie’s house up on Bobcat. But here is the box containing our collection of phenomena, which you may recall — the man doll Robert E. Lee still vanquished, tossed in a heap with Margaret and Fleur those beautiful brides, all vanquished, and so long dead. The photograph of Simon Black (how young he was!) and my father (how handsome!) gone off to war. The filigree casket of fool’s gold, three poetry books, two catechisms, the green liqueur glass from Venice, my mother’s silver hairbrush. A sizable number of animal bones, especially jawbones, skulls, and feet, though I gave the Yankee hand to Mary White, and where is it now? Ensconced in the world of light.

There is one new addition to this box of phenomena which you have not yet seen. Here. Isn’t it heavy, surprisingly heavy? It is a heart-shaped stirrup forged by Simon Black for my mother, Alice Heart, years ago at Perdido, when they were about ten years old. Children. They were just children. I know all about it now. I know the whole story of Simon Black.

For soon after my return to Agate Hill, I woke up in the night and went down to lie beside him, a thing I could never have imagined doing in all my life. Yet I found there an indescribable sweetness and peace, a sort of joy, and I stayed with him until his death, flesh to flesh, bone to bone, pressing my body against his, the whole long fragile length of him, for it meant nothing
now, and everything — it was the least that I could do. Sometimes I read poetry aloud from Uncle Junius’s books, Shakespeare and Robert Burns and Byron and Wordsworth, and Simon Black seemed to like this, the sound of the words, though he was not an educated man. Henry and Juney took care of us. At the end, I don’t believe Simon Black knew who I was, and I am not sure I knew who I was either.

I lay beside him as he died, early on a midsummer morning. First light, the birds going wild in the trees. He had lain unconscious for several days. The perfume of Fannie’s Aurora rose filled the room, for it was blooming just outside the open window. I had noted it as I woke and slept and woke and slept throughout that whole long night, for I slept lightly then, my ear pressed against the bony cage of his ribs. The evening star still hung in the sky when I woke that last time to realize that Simon had slipped away. I lay beside him while the evening star faded and the yard filled with sunshine slanting in our window and across the bed. What a man he was. I lay beside him while all the changes took place, his ravaged body cooling, his thin arm growing stiff across my breast. We are like a sarcophagus, I thought, remembering the Etruscan tombs in Miss Lovinia Newberry’s art class at Gatewood, so long ago. Now we are the sarcophagus itself. After a time, Juney came to stand beside the bed, for Juney always knows everything, and after some more time, he went for Henry. They had to help me break away from Simon’s last embrace.

“Molly.” Henry opened the drawer of the table beside the bed and took out the pigskin case which Simon had always kept there. “Open it,” he said. “It is for you.”

I took the case and sat up beside Simon and untied the leather strips which bound it. There was the stirrup, and there was this letter to me, penned in his careful hand.

•  •  •

January 1, 1907

My Darling Molly,

I shall be gone when you read these words, yet you shall know the high esteem in which I hold you, the love I have carried like a precious vessel for you always, a love perhaps more perfect still for its impossibility upon this ravaged earth. Time and again I have intended to explain myself to you, yet I am a man of actions, not words, as you may surmise. But the time draws nigh. It is my intention therefore to make a full accounting of myself humbly and forthrightly before you who remain the very center of my being, as I remain your obedient servant.

Let us go straight to the source and center of my greatest shame, the moment when your father lay dying in the yard of the Harper farmplace at Bentonville, one hand mangled and one leg amputated and his stomach pierced by a bullet meant for me. “Charlie,” I said, “By God I am sorry, I did not mean to do it,” for I had wheeled my horse on instinct as we proceeded up the muddy road through the incessant rain to join Hardee’s command, myself at the head of the column, and he had taken the sharpshooter’s fire. This I had done though Charles had saved my life at Trevillian Station, wounding himself at the time. “Charlie, can you hear me?” I kept saying into his ear, for the groans of the dying all around us and the screams of those undergoing amputation in the upstairs rooms of the Harper house were horrible. Legs came flying out the windows into a pile which grew as high as the smokehouse. A boy sitting next to me observed that it was easy to tell the leg of a cavalryman from that of an infantryman, the legs of the horsemen being thin and weak, while marching had made the legs of the foot soldiers muscular. Blood lay in puddles in the yard around us.

“Charlie,” I said though his face was white as paper and his chest neither rose nor fell. But suddenly Charlie’s eyelids flickered. I pressed my ear to his mouth so as to hear him if he should speak.

“You old cuss,” he said. “Now go tell Alice . . .” Then he was gone.

I swore a sacred oath, then and there, to look after Alice and his children.

Still yet when the time of surrender finally came at the Bennett farmhouse scarcely one month later, I could not bring myself to dismount or go forward into the open where men of both armies milled about in fields and yard. There they stood, my brothers, hats in hand or pressed to chest, some of them weeping openly. Though many had fallen, I had been with a few of these boys since Edgefield. We had come down this long and terrible road together, and had got damn good at it too.

There stood William Halsey with his head hanging down in the sun and his mouth hanging open like a simpleton, though he had taken the highest prize at your father’s school. I remembered him next to me in the line at Brandy Station, riding hell for leather, screaming the Rebel Yell. There stood Lonnie Ratchford and Porter Beaulieu who rode with me to steal the beef in Pennsylvania.