On Agate Hill (53 page)

I clutched Henry’s elbow. “Just keep on going straight.” I was already anticipating the
PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign which appeared on the closed gate of the old road leading up to the cemetery. “Turn around when you can,” I told Henry.

It was a long day’s journey out to Four Oaks and then back home; we buried Simon at dusk in the garden plot beside Liddy’s kitchen house at Agate Hill, Henry and Juney taking turns at the shovel. They were making short work of it when suddenly Henry said something in his language, throwing the shovel aside. He knelt reaching into the hole to sift the dirt with both hands, finally drawing forth a long human leg bone attached to a foot. Then he paused, still kneeling, to look at me. Lightning bugs rose from the overgrown garden all around us.

Of course I knew immediately. It was Mister Vogell, Selena’s husband who had disappeared. She had done it, she had killed him so that she could have poor old Uncle Junius. Of course she had! Selena would have done anything. I was not surprised, I believe I had known it all along. Perhaps this is why I hated her so much, because I knew — even then — that I was exactly like her, skin and bone, tooth and claw. I would have done anything at all to have my Jacky.

Juney cocked his head toward me, but this was a love story too long and too hard to tell. And in the end it didn’t matter.

“Put him back,” I said, and so they dug another grave for Simon, over there by the miller’s stone where those sunflowers are growing now. There is no stone.

Just look.

Have you ever seen any sunflowers so big? Nobody else has either. They come back bigger every year. I swear, they are pretty as a picture.

July 21, 1927

Upon Simon’s death, I got up and took charge. We cleaned out the tenant house and moved in there, Juney and myself, while Henry took Liddy’s kitchen, thus giving Agate Hill over to its ghosts for good. Now they rush through the passage, up the stairs and down, up and down, they have the
run of this house. The foundation is crumbling, the roof of the parlor is falling in.

But we don’t care. We are done with all that.

Henry and Juney dug up the big field beside Liddy’s kitchen. Here. You can see them out there working in the garden right now, through this chink of a window.

Just look!

What a garden!

Now in midsummer we have row upon row of tall rustling corn with silk at the tops of the ears and morning glories climbing all over the sturdy stalks, potatoes and cabbage and onions and beets, big old pie plants and shiny elegant eggplant, hill after riotous hill of squash — Hubbard, pittypat, yellow, and green — with their yellow flowers blooming. Beans climb up the strings laced between their poles like Jacob’s ladders. Skinny orange carrots stand in the dirt with their lacy tops waving. Gourds and watermelons hide among their vines growing bigger and bigger. In spring we have early greens and little butter lettuce and also ruffly lettuce, like crinolines. Pumpkins and mustard and curly kale in the fall, and collards with their huge veiny leaves.

But look.

Juney moves across the garden on his hands and knees as the sun moves across the sky, pulling radishes like jewels out of the earth, onions and potatoes with dirt clinging to them. Henry follows, holding the old flat basket, both of them unhurried, for they know they have all the time in the world. Here we’ve got nothing but time! Juney wears a pale blue shirt and an old straw hat. His fingers scurry like spiders, finding sweet peas. Henry goes away with his basket full and comes back with another basket. Now Juney stands and moves among the corn rows, lost to view. Juney can tell a perfect full ear by the feel of it, he is never wrong.

On Saturday we will take all these vegetables to market in town along with some eggs and some flowers stuck into old coffee cans that Mister Jordan gives us from the coffee shop every Saturday. We like to go to market. We sit on the bench outside the old courthouse until everything is sold. Then
Juney will play us a tune on Spencer’s old harmonica, he plays “Shortnin’Bread” and “John Henry” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Juney learned these tunes from negroes when he lived in the woods and on the place by himself for so long like an animal. The negroes called him the Big-Headed Boy.

“Stagolee and Billy, two men who gambled late, Stagolee threw a seven and he swore that he threw eight,” Juney will sing while everybody gathers round. One time a nice young man came out here and recorded Juney singing into a machine. Another time some bad boys from town came out here and picked him up in a car and took him to sing at a party. They dumped him back onto the piazza the next day and he was hurt, he ran into the woods and was gone for days, I do not know what happened to him. Their mothers came out from town to apologize. “Stagolee shot Billy, Billy fall down on the floor —” Whenever Juney sings and plays the harmonica, a good-sized crowd will gather.

Oh I know what they say about us in town, and I say, the hell with them! I tell you, I don’t give a damn. I have got to be an old woman in the twinkling of an eye, and it is sort of a relief, I can tell you. I do what I want to now. Last week I traded all our eggs for ice cream at Holden’s Grocery. Now that I have shrunk down little as a child, I figure I might as well act like one. I don’t care. I like ice cream. Juney does too. We like to put bourbon in it, and make ourselves a milkshake.

Look at him out there in the hot hot sun, moving so slow along the rows. He is as good as he can be. Two negro women have come now to sit patiently on the bench over there under the tulip tree, one of them is reading a magazine, perhaps she will leave it for me. I like to find out what they are up to, all these girls. These two have come to consult Juney, and I know they will wait all day long if they have to. One of them looks to be pregnant, though it is hard to tell from up here. A little split oak basket sits between them, covered by a red cloth, so I know we will have something nice for supper.

I hope it is salmon cakes. We like salmon cakes too.

We love it when people bring their babies, which they often do, Juney
has a way with babies. They quit screaming the minute he lays them flat on their tummies across his knees. His fingers are so little and quick, he can get out splinters, thorns, and fishbones in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. He blows down their throats to cure thrush. He says something into their ears for earache — who knows what Juney says? — and uses spiderwebs to stop bleeding. He did this to me one day when I had cut my finger with the kitchen knife, and it stopped immediately.

Juney is sweet as pie, my little man, as Simon called him. It kills me to think of him running wild in the woods all those years, it’s amazing he’s still alive. Or maybe not. But I wish so much that I had been here to find him and catch him and hold him tight. That’s all he needs. So I can’t die, for then who will do it? I think about this all the time. He won’t come to Henry. Sometimes Juney just sits like a sweet potato, with no more going on in his mind than that, his face so sweet and blank, but at other times he still takes off through the woods and no one can find him though he always comes home eventually. He is so tired then, he sleeps for days.

Juney moves along the rows while the negro girls fan themselves with their magazine. They have been joined by a white man in a white suit. It is not uncommon for people to drive miles to speak to Juney, though he does not really talk much. “No,” he’ll say, or “Yes,” or “Something like that.” It seems to be enough. Mostly he just listens and touches them, or touches something that they have brought with them, such as a handkerchief from somebody sick, or somebody they love or hate or something. There is no end to the kinds of trouble that people get into. There is no end to the terrible things that happen to them. Not a day passes that we don’t have somebody. They wait as long as they need to. They bring what they can. Sometimes it is a cake or a pie or a loaf of bread or a pretty rock or a feather or a hundred dollars or a bottle of bourbon. We like bourbon. Sometimes it is nothing. It doesn’t matter. It is a gift, as Juney’s illness, if it is an illness, has left him with certain gifts.

Now Juney moves across the garden on his hands and knees like a bug, lifting tomatoes up one by one to Henry who places them carefully in the
basket so that they will not bruise. Our tomatoes are the best at the market, people always line up before we get there and we always sell out in fifteen minutes, or just as long as it takes me to weigh out the tomatoes and make the change, doing the sums in my head. It’s a funny thing. Sometimes these days I can’t remember people’s names, or whether I had breakfast or not, or what I was going to do when I went over to the stove. But I can still add the sums up lickety-split in my head, and recite most of “Hiawatha’s Childhood” for Juney. This is his favorite poem. He loves to say “Gitchee gumee” and “the shining Big-Sea-Water.” He also loves

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred

and “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.” Juney loves poems, and he loves stories too.

“Say it, Mammalee,” he begs. Over the years he has gone from calling me Molly, or something like Molly, to Ma, to Mamma, to Mammalee. “Say it, Mammalee,” he begs, and I do, telling him, for instance, the story of the time Spencer caught the big fish, or the time the ghost horse galloped around the circle, or the time Old Bess and Virgil flew away over the snow, or the time Mary White and me saw the fairies, for I remember everything. “Say it, Mammalee,” Juney says, and I do. I say the world for him.

So I am the one who adds up the sums and tells the stories. Henry is the one who drives the car, for we have got a blue humpbacked car now, brought out to us from town by little Russ Grady, the son of old Russell Grady who was Simon’s attorney. We go to market in the car, Henry driving, me wearing Mitty’s old black hat, I know it scares the children, but you know what? I like to scare the children! And I believe they like it too.

•  •  •

July 22

I have forgot to say that twice lately I have waked to find myself in the passage, then last night I woke up out on the hill in the moonlight, you know I used to sleepwalk as a girl. The full moon cast shadows behind every tree and the night breeze blew my nightgown around my legs. I had no memory of how I got out there, or even of going to bed, or what we ate for supper, or anything. But there I was on the hill, and then there was Juney too, he held out his little hand which did not surprise me, for Juney knows everything. Oftentimes he will answer questions before I even ask them, such as once I was wondering whatever became of Nicky Eck and he said, “Kilted, Mammalee, kilted.” His illness, if it is an illness, has left him with certain gifts. Sometimes I think he sees all our lives as if we are the people in the village in the paperweight Ben Valiant gave me so long ago, he sees our comings and goings to and fro, he sees me nursing Christabel deep in the night while the rain drums so loud on the roof and there’s nobody awake but us, he sees Simon’s Minha Nega and his twin boys caught forever in the water at the bottom of the lake with the skirt of her blue embroidered peasant dress swirling all around them.

I took Juney’s hand and we walked out of the woods and across the yard together past the big garden with our shadows going out in front of us like giants. “Look Mammalee,” said Juney, waving his arms, and then both of us waved our arms up and down and our shadows waved back, we were both laughing so hard it was so funny though it was the middle of the night, I could not do without my little man.

He was working out in the garden with Henry when I woke up in my small iron bed in the tenant’s house, this used to be Selena’s house, and this was the children’s bed. Somehow it had already got to be afternoon.

I have forgot to tell you that Godfrey came back here once in the wintertime, snooping around in a big black car, he said that Blanche has been dead of tuberculosis for lo these many years and that Victoria had become a
famous whore in San Francisco, then a rich man’s wife. She lives in a hotel now and wears an evening dress to dinner every night. Well I was glad to hear this! But all my life I have wondered, whatever became of Mary White? Godfrey of course did not know. Godfrey himself is a fatcat. He did not stay long or even get out of the car for Henry stood right there beside me holding the ax as he had been chopping firewood when they drove up. Godfrey had a lady in the car with him who kept saying, “Honey, let’s get out of here! This place is giving me the creeps!” Later we learned that he went on into town to look up the title on this property, but little Russ Grady handled that! “You are not to worry,” big Russell Grady always told us. “Mister Black has taken very good care of you.”