Oral History (9781101565612) (24 page)

This is the way I put it up if you have to know. I take me about a peck of green tomatoes, and a peck of string beans, and a good-size bunch of little old onions and green peppers, and I get me some red peppers too, and two big old head-cabbages, and I chop it all up and put it in the pot. Then I pour in my vinegar to cover, and I add my sugar and some pickling spice, and then I boil it down. It takes about two hours to boil it down.

My mama used to say tomatoes was poison, she wouldn't touch a one. Well, some things change.

And some don't. I was a-crossing Grassy Creek—coming back from Rhoda's with a poultice on my wart—on the footpath in the early morning dew, I'd left Harp at home a-laying up in the bed, when all of a sudden I felt a cold wind rise up on me out of noplace, and it July. I said I felt that wind rise up. And then the hair on my arms rises straight up too, and I got goosebumps all over. I knowed I had felt that way before, and it twenty-five years gone. But you don't forget a thing like that, nor how you felt. I quick-looked all about, wasn't naught to be seen but the little flowers and the ferns and all down by the creek, and the fog how it hung by the shady bank, and the sun coming down through the trees. But I felt as cold as death. I looked up the holler toward the Cantrell place, which you just could see if you tried, but wasn't no sign of life up there nor a thing to remark in particular.

Lord knows what-all goes on up there anyway, as I said it that morning to Rhoda who laughed the way she does and says “Nothing much.” “Nothing much!” I says. “I would not call it nothing with one girl pregnant and going around like she's having some kind of a spell, with a crippled boy lagging after her, and the little girl sick, and that Jink that takes so after his daddy when he was that age, always slipping out and mooning around.”

“It's a fact, he does,” Rhoda said, kind of surprised-like, and her daughter who's tetched in the head rolled her eyes back and said, “Does what?” and Rhoda said, “Take after his daddy,” and then Rose set in to crying again. Rose was trying to braid her hair.

“Here, now,” Rhoda told me. “You keep this on it a hour or so, and then when you get home, I'll tell you what you do. You take this off, and you let it bleed some, and you put the blood on a penny and lay the penny in the road, and when somebody picks it up, the wart will go away.” Well, we've all gotten old now and that's a fact, but Rhoda has wrinkled up in the face like a pecan nut with her eyes still as blue as the sky. I call her Rhoda myself, seeing as how we growed up together so, but there's lots of others just calls her Granny. And anyway you take her things when you put them up, just like you did Granny Younger, you know how you do. They was a Ramey girl over there that morning, in fact, bringing Rhoda some beets. Beets! Harp wouldn't eat a beet if he had to. He'll eat anything else in this world.

“They's a curse on the holler,” Rose says, follering me to the door, “and on all them pretty girls.” Rhoda just smiled her little smile, I'd give a lot to know what she thinks sometimes of what Rose says, and Rose's eyes burned out like cinders in that ashy pale face as she braided her long gray hair. Lord, we're all of us getting so old!

But I'm no fool, I'll tell you, and when I crossed back over that creek is when I felt that cold air rise and then directly I heard that laugh which there wasn't no mistaking even if I hadn't heard it for twenty-five years. I was over the creek by then, and let me tell you I took off as fast as these old legs would carry me. And still I heard that laughing, it was like it come down out of the trees, and then it was right on my heels, or it'll move up ahead on the path, and me just a-freezing to death and moving as fast as I'm able. I see that big pine tree up ahead where I'm fixing to turn to get to Bill's, and I'm thinking well, thank the Lord, when all of a sudden there starts up this barking at my heels. But of course there wasn't no dog! No, it was Almarine's ghost-dog, the one that never come back after he kilt that witch, and this ghost-dog consorts with her now and follers wherever she'll go. It was a good thing for me I started saying the Lord's Prayer out loud then, and I said it as loud as I could.

It's a wonder I ever made it to Bill's in one piece. I knocked and knocked on the door until finally she came to open it, that Susie, and I see at a glance she's been back in the bed, with him already up and gone to the mine. That's Bill. And that's that lazy Susie.

“Why, what's the matter, Ludie?” Susie said, acting just so sweet like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth when you know that's not really her nature, and she holped me to a chair and got me a drink of water. Then I told her all about the witch a-coming to hant me in Hoot Owl Holler and how that ghost-dog barked at my heels. Then I felt so weak-like when I was through that I had to lay down in the bed myself, I had plumb give out. And I slept like a log that whole afternoon, waking up just in time to hear the tail-end of her telling Bill and the boys about it when they got home.

Bill scratched his head and turned that hat with the light on it around and around in his hands. “Well hell, Susie,” he said. “What you want me to do about it?”

“She just wants me to wait on her hand and foot,” Susie said, which was a lie, and I sat up and said so to her face.

“I have seed a ghost,” I told them all, “and I have lost my wart poultice, and I have been chased by a ghost-dog. I am not in bad shape considering,” I said, and then I laid back down and told it.

Now Bill Jr., who is the eldest grandson, was standing there so still, listening, with the coal dust ringing his eyes, and when I was finished he said, “That puts me in mind of something, Mamaw. You know last Christmas when Donny Osborne fell offen the mountain and broke his leg over there on Snowman where them big white rocks is? You-all remember that? Well, he swore it was a dog chased him offen the clift but he didn't never see no dog. He said it like to drove him crazy barking.” Bill Jr.'s eyes went around at us all, and you know he's so honest since he has got saved.

“Hellfire,” Bill said, and then he told Susie to heat up some beans to go with the pickle lilly.

“You can't stay but a day now,” she said to me while the men was outside washing. “Or who'll take care of old Harp?”

“I tell you it was
her
,” I said, “and that infernal dog, and I don't care if you'll listen to me or not, there's a-plenty that will,” I said, and there is. Believe me, there is.

Later today this room will be hot, too hot for a boarder to stand it even if there was a boarder here to do so, which there is not, times being hard as they are. Come three o'clock, it'll be like an oven in here. Justine Poole will close it off then, and she'll close off the three other rooms which get the sun. She'll sit on the porch drinking tea. But right now it's nice up here. Both the windows are open wide, shades up, and the breeze comes in and moves the soiled muslin curtains which flutter like moths, and noise comes up from the street. Car horns and the occasional clip-clop of a mule-wagon going past, and the women's voices twittering to and fro, in and out of hearing, beneath the windows. Men's voices too, more men than you'd hear if it wasn't hard times and so many out of work, men's voices low and halting, with sometimes a hoarse shout of laughter. The union man has a high-pitched voice, and a different accent. “Absentee money,” he says—you can hear him above the rest—and “work like dogs,” but you can't hear what-all he says. Anyway it's Saturday, day after payday for those lucky enough to be working, close to noon, and the breeze comes up in the windows blowing the curtains and now Blind Bart has started up on his harmonica over there in front of the courthouse, playing “Saro Jane” low and sweet, to suit the morning. Later on when the Busy Bee opens up down the way in the house where the Astons lived, and they start selling beer at Old Man Long's and Loretta's Place, why then Blind Bart will change his tune and Justine Poole will switch from tea to bourbon on her porch, awaiting the rivet salesman from Bluefield, as the town cranks up for Saturday night. But it's still early now, still cool up here, although the sun is bright as it shines through the turning dust in the air, showing up all the gray smudges on the white wallpaper between the violets, falling in a solid golden block across the twisted white sheet on the bed.

Aldous Rife, naked, lies flat on his back with his bandy legs spraddled out so the breeze can get to his vitals. Justine Poole lies on her stomach with her bare ass stuck up in the air and one foot stuck up too, bent at the knee, tracing circles in the sun with her small, surprisingly pretty little foot with its red, red toenails. She props herself up on one elbow now, and starts to fool with the tangled gray hair on Aldous's sunken chest.

“Cut that out, honey,” Aldous says like he always does, but he knows she won't. Justine is all the time brushing off your lapel or squeezing a blackhead or doing her own nails or smoothing your hair down in back. She's got to be doing something with her hands. Now this is a trait that Aldous might not have liked in another woman—say, one of his wives—but he likes it fine in Justine. Justine is a busy woman, always was. You know she's got things to do. So when she sighs all of a sudden, a big long sigh like she's lost the last friend she ever had or hoped to have, and rolls over on her back and lets her arms flap down at her sides, this surprises Aldous. It's not a bit like Justine.

“What's the matter?” he asks her.

“I was just thinking about that boy from Richmond, that Richard Burlage,” Justine said. “You know this used to be his room.”

“Did it?” Aldous is surprised. First they use one room, then another, depending on what time of day it is and which rooms Justine has rented out. They've been at this for twenty years.

“He kept it the whole time he was here,” Justine said. “September to January.”

“I know how long he was here,” Aldous says drily. “In fact I am still surprised that I got him out of town in one piece. I wrote his father quite a letter, Justine, did I tell you that?”

“Letter saying what?”

“Saying that Richard had sowed his oats in the wrong field, basically, and advising him never to come back here again.”

Justine sighs and crosses her arms behind her head.

“Well, what have we here?” old Aldous asks, raising himself up so he can see her face. “I believe you were a bit sweet on him yourself, Justine, if the truth be told.”

“Oh shit,” Justine says, her mouth in a plump round pout.

“Yes?” Aldous asks, in a grotesque parody of the manner he adopts when his few parishioners come to him with their problems. “Yes?” he prompts again.

“Shit yes,” Justine says. “He was a sweetie, Aldous, he really was. I mean he was so polite, he was always
thanking
me for something, even if I hadn't done a thing. He was always saying please. You know how he was.”

“I know,” Aldous says.

“And he had that little look on his face, like he thought you were going to give him a present, or like he thought he was going to learn something.”

“Which he did not,” Aldous interjects.

“Like he was waiting for something good to happen,” she goes on. “That's what it was. And then he used to
worry
so much, too. Well, you know how he was.”

“Yes,” Aldous says, laying back to stare at the billowing curtains, “By God, I do,” realizing he had never liked the boy precisely because he knew all too well how he was, a young man a lot like himself, thinking back to when he had been that young and that idealistic, that capable of obsessive love, and thinking too of the women he'd spent it on, wasted it, the first one who used to undress in a closet and the second who sewed all the time and snapped off her thread with her teeth. Good women both. He had picked them himself out of his various congregations, out of some obscure sense of what was fitting, what was right. Thank God there had been no children. It had been wrong all along, the second as wrong as the first. Perhaps this was why he had not stepped in when he learned that the boy had sent for Dory, that the boy had decided to take her back to Richmond with him. Let him have her, Aldous had thought then, even if it's not fitting, by God! Let her go. But then she had not come! to his great surprise, for Dory—as he well knew—was a girl who had been doted on all her life, a strong-willed girl, he thought, who knew her own mind, and it still surprised him that she had not come. Yet it would be better in the end, he was sure of that, better at least for the boy. Aldous smiles up through the turning dust in the sun, smiling at nothing, as he tries to remember how it was to be young like that and torn up all the time over something. He remembers a time on a trip with his first wife when he had strode furiously out to a gazebo (where had they been?) where he paced and smoked for half the night, flinging his cigarettes over the railing into the roses, but he cannot now recall the quarrel. Nor can he recall how he felt then, or why he was so upset. He's glad it's behind him now.

Justine is at it again, holding one arm straight out and clutching at the drooping flesh of that upper arm with her other hand.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I read it in a magazine,” Justine says. “See? Looky here. That means you need to go on a diet.”

Her upper arm dangles and Aldous snorts. Justine is always dieting, diets she reads in the magazines, but she never stays on them long enough to matter. For one thing, she's such a good cook. Justine is soft all over, white freckled skin so fair she'll bruise if you give her a pinch. Now she turns to him and begins to stroke his penis, pull it a little, and Aldous lies back and looks up and lets her work. They both know he probably won't manage an erection again; once is enough for an old man, but it feels good and she likes to do it.
She likes to do it
, this is what Aldous can never get over about Justine. Her rolls of fat bunch up at her waist and her breasts slide sideways, all of her companionable, as she leans up on an elbow and does it now.