Oral History (9781101565612) (28 page)

“Aw, shoot, Parrot,” Peter Paul said, but Parrot grinned and went on.

“And then I commenced to notice I had four legs instead of two, and that they was horse's legs, and the reason I couldn't seem to catch my breath atall was because they was somebody on me riding hell-for-leather up a rocky mountain trace, and kicking my side all the way. So then I pricked up my ears—I had these big old horse ears, you know—and I heard more horses galloping behind me, and I swiveled my head around to look, and sure enough here come two more horses and riders behind me, the riders all dressed in black and bent low to the saddle, and my rider sawed back on the bit, liked to broke my jaw, and hit me across the flanks. ‘Git on,' come the voice, and then I knowed it was the widder on my back.

“Well they urged us on till I just about drapped in my tracks, and finally we come up to a cave in the mountain and they reined us in at last. My legs and my flanks was quivering so I couldn't hardly stand, but I took enough notice to see what it was that they was a-doing, and why they had rode us here.

“They had two saddle-bags apiece, and they swung them down now offen us and placed them in the cave, and by the weight of them and how they clanked I could tell they was full of money. So I just snorted and pawed at the ground, and acted like I didn't notice, and after a while the three of them come back outen the cave. The other two was men, as mean a-looking men as ever you hope to see, one with a scar come all the way acrost his face like this”—Parrot drew a scar acrost his face—“and the other one missing three fingers on his left hand. So they all mounted up and rode us home. And the next morning, fellers, when I woke up I was stiff as a board and I knew she'd kill me before she was through if I couldn't do naught to outsmart her.

“So I laid out of work that day and went downtown to get my breakfast, and while I was in there eating, I heard them all talking about the bank robberies taking place in that section, and how they'd had three in a row so far, and the sheriff with nary a clue. Well, I didn't say a word to that, mind you, or act like I was interested atall, I just ate my ham and biscuits with nary a word, but I was turning it all in my mind and before I knowed it, I'd come up with what I was going to do, fellers, I'd made me a plan.”

Lute and I were so busy listening we'd forgot to scrape.

“Well, they never come that night, nor the next, nor the one after that, I slept like the dead for the next three nights, and then on the fourth night when I woke up with that piercing pain from them spurs digging into my side, I was fit as a fiddle and ready.”

“What'd you do?” Lute asked.

But Parrot held up his hand and said, “Son, I'm getting to that. I wanted that money, you see, I wanted to know how to get back there, and so all the way up the mountain that night I made out like I'd gone lame and I stumbled, and the widder woman cursing me every step of the way, but what she didn't know was that I was blazing the trail with my hooves, kicking over rocks and stripping the bark offen bushes and trees, so come morning I could find my way to return. Well, we got up there and sure enough there was the cave, and sure enough they all jumped down and pulled off the saddlebags and ran in the cave. And I was determined to mark the spot. Now how can I do it, I thought to myself, so I can be sure to find it come daylight? Because that cave was fairly hid in the brushy-thicket, you couldn't even tell it was there if you didn't know. The only time you could see it atall was when they pulled back the brush, you could see the opening. I knowed I could never tell it without no mark.

“So I thought to myself, and I thought to myself, and I thought, ‘Parrot, now how can you mark this spot?' and then I got an idea. I screwed up my vitals as hard as I could and laid a big old pile of shit right there outside that brushy thicket and then I worked loose from where she had tied me and I trotted over there to the brushy thicket and pushed through with my nose until I had got my head inside that cave. And you won't believe what happened next.”

“What?”
I don't know if it was me said it, or maybe Lute said it, or maybe we said it together. Wasn't nobody saying another word, everbody crowding right around Parrot to hear what was coming next.

Parrot made his voice go real low and scary, you had to cock your head to hear what he said.

“I stuck my head in that cave like I said, and it was hot in there, which surprised me, and it had a funny smell to it, and it was black as the blackest night you have ever seen or ever imagined in all your life. And then I heard this voice, this real loud voice hollering at me. It said”—Parrot hollered too—“Parrot Blankenship, Parrot Blankenship, you'll be sorry for what you done!

“And then I woke up, boys, and I was in the widder's bed with my face in her crack, and I had done benastied myself!”

It took me a minute to get it, and then I started laughing so hard I drapped my knife. All the men was—were—fit to be tied, laughing and slapping their legs, and Wall was fanning his face with his big black hat. This went on for a while, and it took a while before we got back to the hog-killing. We were on the last one by now, the Davenports stringing him up.

“Now boys.” Peter Paul Ramey went and stood in front of the last hog—the hog was still so hot from being scalded in the drum that he was throwing out steam from his whole body, steaming out white in the cold air—“You come on over here, boys,” Peter Paul said, and me and Lute got up and went over there, and I didn't know what was fixing to happen.

Peter Paul stuck out his hand with the hog knife in it, handle turned to me, and said, “You cut this one, boy,” and he told Lute to catch the innards in the tub and to scrape out what did not come natural. I knowed I was fixing to disgrace us all, and be sick or fall out on the ground like Mary in one of her fits, and I looked around quick but thank God anyway Mamaw was up at the house. They must of been ten or eleven men between me and the house, so there wasn't no running thataway, and nothing behind me but Hoot Owl Mountain and I guess I knew already I couldn't go up there and stay for good like I'd thought about for so long, me and Dory and Mary and him. All the men were breathing out white in the air and grinning.

“Start right here,” Peter Paul said, pointing, and I knew there was nothing for it but to do it.

So I drawed in my breath and got the knife around the handle with both hands and raised my hands above my head and jabbed it in as hard as I could and pulled it down as far as I was able, and all of them innards came tumbling and quil-ing out and the men were hollering and laughing, and Lute cotched them up in the tub. Then Peter Paul grabbed up a piece of innards and throwed it around my neck like a rope and one around Lute's neck too, it was hot as fire and smelled awful, and I got mad then and yelled out and throwed it straight back at Peter Paul. I didn't care what happened. Lute throwed his down on the ground and stomped on it, and then the men were whooping and slapping us both on the back and we all started drinking liquor.

I tipped my head back and took it down like it was water, and it felt like it burned a path right down my gut, or like somebody had slit me right down the middle the way I had done that hog, Old Man Justice said he had never seen a cleaner cut. I must of got drunk then, I don't recall too much of the rest of the afternoon, but Lute and me and the other men drunk some more and finished off that hog and then some of them went home and some of them went on up to the house to eat. I was on my way up to the house too, last I remember, it was well-nigh dark and I was walking up that way when I had to piss so I went off in the woods and then the first thing I recall, I woke right up in the pitch dark with no notion of where I was, nor who I was, nor whether it was night or day, nor nothing. Then I heard Mamaw calling my name, so I knew who I was, and then it all come back to me and I leaned over and puked till I liked to puked up my guts. I got up—my legs were still real wobbly, the way a foal is the first time it stands—and made my way outen the woods and on up to the house.

“Jink! You Jink!” Mamaw hollered out the back door, but I never answered her back. I went around to the front and walked in where they had a fire and some several still there sitting around it, and Little Luther strumming on his guitar and Dory sitting close by him.

“Everbody's been looking for you, Jink,” Dory said to me when I come in. “Honey, where you been?” But Dory never took her eyes offen Little Luther, and I could tell she didn't care where I'd been, and I could tell she had softened up toward him now.

So I went on up to the loft and looked at Mary, fast asleep on the tick next to mine, it was kindly dark up there but I still could see Mary's face, and leaned down to see was she breathing, she looked so poorly. Mamaw was yelling out my name, but I would of died before I'd of gone down there now.

I hated them ever one. I laid down and looked out through the dark and the firelight shadows up in the beams and then I got up after while and looked down and Dory and Little Luther was kissing, or I thought they was but the fire had got so low you couldn't tell, or I couldn't, I guess I was crying too, and me a man, and I hated them ever one worse than ever and I could see all their faces out there in the dark and they was ever one of their faces black. So I got up and went over in the corner where I had it wrapped up in a old torn shirt stuck down in the tore-up bed-tick. It was dried as hard as a rock but I could feel the little dents in it all over and I knowed—knew—it had come from Florida in the South, and in the dark I made like it was still bright orange, as orange as it was when he give them out, as orange as the sun when it come up that morning and as round as Dory's belly used to be, as round as the whole big globe of the earth he had, and I thought to myself how I'd up and leave here after while, me and Mary we'd up and leave and strike out walking as far as we could get acrost the big round world.

If I hadn't of been like I am, Parrot never would of loved me, and if I hadn't of been like I am, he never would of left me neither. And I don't know to this day which one was worse—the loving or the leaving—and I don't care. He picked me a-purpose to fit his needs, never knowing he fit mine, too. But you do what you have to do, I say. It's not a lot of choices in the world.

I wisht I didn't know what-all I know, nor have to do what-all I have to. Seems like it's been that way ever since I can remember, I've been working my knuckles straight down to the bone taking care of Cantrells.

Since I was a little girl and I come here with Mamaw, all them years ago but it don't seem that long to me, I swear it don't. It's like you close your eyes and its five years gone, and you blink again and it's ten.

But I remember that day just as plain. We come up the trace and it was raining, and I started hanging back. “Come on, Ora Mae,” Mamaw said, yanking at my hand at first and then switching my legs when I wouldn't come. So I come on—nothing else to do, me naught but a little girl—and the farther I come, the more I felt these mountains closing in, and by the time I got up to the house it was like they had closed up in a circle around me. Even before he opened the door and I seen him, I knowed we was there to stay. I knowed I would never leave, and I won't, I'll be right here to the end of my days in Hoot Owl Holler. I know what I know but I wisht I didn't, I've got the gift you don't never want to have. Rhoda said it when I was not but nine or ten, and she was right. I didn't want it then and I don't now. There's folks think they've got it, like Ludie Davenport, say, but by and large they don't know a thing.

Rhoda called me to her oncet a long while back when she was laid up in the bed sick and there was a baby up on Snowman Mountain that had the thrash.

“That baby has not been able to suck for three days running,” Rhoda said. “Its mouth is naught but a sore.”

“Don't tell me,” I told her, but Rhoda said, “I am. I have knowed you since you was a girl, Ora Mae, and we both of us knows what you know. It's high time you got a move on. Now I am a-laying here in the bed with a foot swole up like a pun-kin, and somebody has got to go on up there and do it. Its daddy is waiting outside.”

I went over and looked out the door and sure enough he was out there, smoking cigarettes and stomping his feet in the mud with his horse tied up to a tree, didn't look hardly old enough to have no child.

“Get Rose to go,” I said for meanness, and Rhoda said, “Don't talk like a fool.” Rose was in the next room slobbering and mumbling, Rhoda had to keep her in the house by then.

I walked around looking at Rhoda's house and all the stuff people bring her, and looking out the door at that boy by the tree. Rhoda had a little old monkey that smoked these trick cigarettes, somebody had brung it back to her from a trip. Another thing she had was a red velvet cake, which I have always been partial to. I got me a piece and sat down in the chair by the bed and ate it.

“You are a hard one, Ora Mae,” Rhoda said, watching me eat that cake. Then she sighed a long rattling sigh, trying to make me feel sorry for her, but I was wise to her tricks, I know all the tricks there is, from dealing with Cantrells. I got me another piece of cake and some apple cider.

“If I
was
to go up there,” I said, “just supposing I was, what-all would I have to do?” Of course I didn't have no intention of going.

“It takes a woman that never knowed her daddy,” Rhoda said, “and that is you, and you breathe in its mouth while you say the three most powerful names, and that'll get it. It ain't hard.”

“And I ain't a-gonna do it neither,” I said, getting up. “And don't you send for me no more, neither. I ain't a-gonna do it now and I ain't a-gonna do it never,” I said. “You can just forget it.” And I went over and yelled out at that boy he could ride on home. He whooped and hollered and said his baby would die, but I said it wouldn't. “You can just relax,” I said, and when he wouldn't leave, I closed Rhoda's door and locked it for good measure, and finally he rode on off, and it didn't die, neither, just like I said. But I wouldn't of gone if it had.