Pamela Morsi (19 page)

Rans looked up at him, his chin raised high and his eyes narrowed. Without a word he turned and ran down the path as fast as his feet would carry him.

Jeptha sighed loudly and looked up at Moss. There was more than a hint of censure in his expression.

“I didn’t think the idea of being strapped in was all that bad,” he said.

Moss felt the full force of his mistake. With Rans out of sight, there was no one to accept his apology but those gathered around him.

“I didn’t mean to get onto the boy so,” he admitted. “He’s a good fellow and works hard and he tries to please. But he’s got a chip on his shoulder as big as a boulder. Sometimes he just annoys me so much I act like a fool.”

Jeptha nodded. “He annoys ye so much, Moss,” he said, “because he’s so much like ye.”

The meetinghouse was filled, every bench occupied and a dozen young men standing in the back. Preacher
Thompson was waxing eloquent about the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace.

The preacher wrote his sermons on the days he was home and then delivered them on his circuit. By the time he returned to the Sweetwood he had given his exhortation three times and had honed each word and turn of phrase to its maximum effect.

The congregation could therefore personally discern the steely determination of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego willing to face the flames rather than deny their faith. They could also shiver in their own boots as King Nebuchadnezzar looked down into that furnace and spied, not three, but four men walking unburned in the flames.

Eulie paid only tacit attention to the message. She couldn’t have been happier about just being there. This is what she had always dreamed about. Her family, one unit, conjoined and inseparable.

It was important to be together in this place, where her parents and grandparents once sang and worshiped as she did now. Where some day, far in the future, her own children would do the same.

That idea caught her up short. She wouldn’t be having any children of her own, she recalled. Moss was leaving and she would live like a maiden lady all her life.

But she would have nieces and nephews, she reminded herself. The Tobys were obviously good breeders. For certain there would be nieces and nephews. She determinedly took comfort in that thought.

Her family, all neat and tidy, sat beside her on the bench. It hadn’t been easy. The twins had asked to sit
with Miz Patch, but took Eulie’s refusal to allow it good-heartedly. The same could not be said for Little Minnie, who had gone running into Judith Pierce’s arms the moment they arrived. Both the woman and the child tearfully begged to share the service from the Pierces’ pew. Eulie would not even consider it and turned a cold heart to their pleas. Her family would sit together today, each and every one of them.

Even Rans, whom she feared was off on another snit, was hunched over, chin in hand, at the end of the bench. Uncle Jeptha was beside him, his cart in the aisle.

The man’s appearance had caused considerable astonishment and speculation among the congregation. The rush of whispers began even as he pulled his cart up by the door and unhitched Old Hound. No one even spoke to him. Eulie thought that surely a man who had lived in the Sweetwood all his life would have someone come up to talk to him. But he looked neither to the left nor to the right, as if determined not to catch anybody’s eye.

Rans and Moss lifted him in his cart up the meetinghouse steps. Eulie noticed that people took extravagant efforts to move around him at some distance, as if his incapacity were somehow contagious.

Even Preacher Thompson kept a goodly distance between them as he offered a greeting.

“Jeptha Barnes,” he said. “It’s good to see you in church. I hope this means that you’ve begun to contemplate where you will spend eternity.”

Uncle Jeptha had to raise his chin high to look the man square in the face.

“I’m not contemplating it any more than usual,” he answered.

Eulie leaned over to quietly question Moss in the seat beside her. He had been listening avidly to the message from the pulpit, and Eulie felt a twinge of guilt for distracting him.

“Could you believe Uncle Jeptha decided to come with us?” she asked.

Moss’s widened his eyes to express his disbelief and he shook his head. Clearly he could not.

Eulie attempted to turn her attention back to the preaching, but couldn’t manage it fully. This was what she had wanted. This is what she had prayed for and schemed for. And it had all come to pass.

Eulie’s heart was filled with delighted gratitude. Her whole family living under one roof and attending church together at long last. She didn’t add any extra joy for the presence of Moss and Uncle Jeptha. They were part of her family as well. She felt that without any sense of strangeness or uncertainty. They were her family, and it was as important to her to have them with her as one of the children.

The sermon ended, and the congregation noisily came to its feet as the hymn of invitation began:

“God is calling the prodigal,

Come without delay.

Hear his loving voice calling still.”

Beside her, Eulie discovered that Moss had a fine baritone voice that blended beautifully. It was wonderful to stand beside his long lean masculine body. Just to be dose to him. Close to the width of his shoulders and the strength of his hands, just to be close made her feel safe, protected, and somehow feminine. It was a heady sensation. Unexpected. And surprisingly bittersweet.

As Preacher Thompson gave the benediction, Eulie
slipped her palm into her husband’s. It was probably not a good idea, but she just wanted the touch.

As the preacher pronounced the
Amen
, Moss gave her hand a slight squeeze. Eulie opened her eyes and looked up at him. They shared a quick smile. It was, she realized, one of those glances that married people share all the time and take no thought of. One that said merely,
I’m here. I’m here with you.

The contact broke. The moment passed. The crowd began leaving. Jeptha waited to be last, as person after person stepped around him. Finally it was just them, just Eulie’s family left in the church. And they began to make their way out.

Preacher Thompson stood in the doorway, shaking hands and asking questions about crops, fishing, Aunt Dinah’s ague, or the price of corn.

He took Eulie’s hand and leaned forward, quietly asking if she was satisfied with her marriage.

“Oh yes, very much,” she insisted, feeling the heat of blush rise to her cheeks.

The preacher turned to Moss, who was right behind her.

“You look happier already,” he said. “I promise you, Collier, once that baby comes into the world, you’ll be glad you did the right thing.”

Eulie felt an immediate overwhelming need to set the record straight. To confess all and explain how guiltless and victimized Moss Collier had been.

The husband-man, correctly sensing what was about to occur, herded her away from the doorway at near breakneck speed.

“I was just—” she began, but he cut her off.

“It’s nobody’s business but ours,” he told her.

She could hardly fight the wisdom of that.

He left her at the bottom of the steps to go back and help Uncle Jeptha.

On either side of her for the next twenty feet stood lines of young men. The gauntlet, a tradition seemingly as old as the hills themselves, was the major source of love and marriage on the mountain. In a community with homesteads dotted miles apart and enough work to keep every pair of hands busy from morning to night, young folks had little time for meeting and getting to know potential mates. The gauntlet was a courting device, set up to remedy that.

All the single men in the congregation, from pimply-faced youths who’d yet to receive their full growth to aging bachelors not set upon a bride of their own, formed a narrow corridor through which every soul leaving church was forced to walk. The closeness made it possible to verbalize to even the most elusive of Sweetwood females the question of the day.

“May I see you home this evening?”

Because courting was basically a Sunday activity, this was, for most of the unmarried, the only contact with the opposite gender. After a few harmless walks on Preaching Sunday, a fellow might ask to sit other Sundays on her porch, usually with her entire family present. If her father got to know him and like him, he would eventually be allowed to pay court to the female of his choice. But it was no easy road, A young man had to be determined and brave to speak to a girl right in front of her father, who was more than likely looking daggers at some wet-behind-the-ears, worthless whippersnapper who had the audacity to speak up to his daughter.

And often, the fellows had to be persistent in the face of repeated rejection. Even if a girl had set her cap for a certain fellow, it was considered very smart among the young ladies to feign complete deafness for several weeks. An ardent, anxious, stammering farmer wearing his heart upon his sleeve couldn’t tell whether the gal of his dreams was ignoring him because she didn’t like him or ignoring him because she did.

Eulie had always gotten her share of invitations, although no one had ever pursued her consistently. Today there was not one word spoken to her. She walked through unmolested. She was a married woman now, no longer of any interest to gauntlet participants. It was a strange feeling, almost a rite of passage. The man she loved would never call out her name here. But then, Moss Collier had never once stood in the gauntlet. He had never sought a wife.

Up ahead of her, Bug had stopped Clara and spoken his invitation. Eulie watched her sister blush, appearing even prettier than usual as she agreed that indeed she would have no one else but Bug to walk her home.

Eulie wanted to roll her eyes in disgust. But somehow she could not. The two were shyly smiling at each other, beautiful Clara and ugly Bug. As he offered his arm and she took it, they appeared perfectly content and happy together.

They shared a quick glance into each other’s eyes. Eulie was momentarily startled by the intensity of it. Clearly, these two people were in love with each other—a reality that was, for Eulie, difficult to fathom.

“They sure make a perfect couple, don’t they?”

The words were spoken by Miz Patch, who came up
beside her. She had been waiting for the twins at the end of the gauntlet.

Eulie raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“A perfect couple?” Her tone was incredulous. “How can you think that? She’s so pretty and he … he looks like a bug.”

Miz Patch chuckled lightly and shook her head.

“Oh, I suspect it will even out as the years go by,” she said. “Life is a long time. People change, especially on the outside. If you don’t love the core of the person, the source of their soul that remains constant, then anything that happens can likely destroy your feelings. And some terrible things can happen in a life.”

“You sound as if you speak from experience,” Eulie said.

Miz Patch didn’t reply.

“You must have loved your husband very much,” Eulie continued.

Miz Patch glanced over at her, and her shiny brown eyes, normally so full of laughter, were somber and serious.

“Ezra Patchel was a fine, good man,” she said. “I was honored that he allowed me to share his life and comfort him in his old age. Like you, I had done some things that many men would have found impossible to forgive.”

Eulie was startled. Had Miz Patch lied publicly? Had she humiliated her husband? Had she trapped him as Eulie had? She couldn’t imagine the dear woman doing any of those things and was intending to say so, but she saw that Miz Patch’s attention was now focused upon the church door.

Eulie turned in that direction as well to see Rans
and Moss carrying Uncle Jeptha in his goat cart down the steps.

Everybody in the church yard was watching. But as soon as he was set safely upon the ground, each and every one of them turned away, unwilling to look.

“Why is everyone acting so strange to him?” Eulie asked.

“Because he is like a stranger to them,” Miz Patch answered. “He purposely kept himself away, kept himself alone for twenty years. No one knows him.”

“But surely he must have old friends here,” she said. “People who knew him before.”

Miz Patch shook her head negatively. “We pretty much lost everybody in the war,” she replied. “Look around you. There are no men of middle years here, there are only old fellows and their grandsons.

Eulie’s glance quickly swept the clearing and she realized that Miz Patch was right. It was as if a whole generation had been wiped away clean.

“Lem Pierce was too crippled up to go,” Miz Patch continued. “Preacher Thompson was a chaplain and returned unharmed. The rest are all dead and buried long ago. We women are here, of course. Lots of spinsters in our group. And those of us who did wed, well, we married the fathers of the boys who stood in our gauntlet.”

It was a melancholy realization that brought an unexpected tear to Eulie’s eyes.

Miz Patch must have sensed her sorrow and turned to her. The woman’s own expression changed immediately from wistful to matter-of-fact.

“Don’t get all weepy on me now,” she said. “It’ll just give folks more cause for speculation.”

Miz Patch was right, and so Eulie wiped her eyes and deliberately firmed the quivering of her lower lip.

“We’ve got to get this dinner set up before the young folks start chewing on the fence posts,” she said.

T
HE
dinner had been a big success. Eulie had yet to eat one bite, but every man and child had been adequately fed. The former were now ensconced together in little groups, talking hunting and crops or telling fish tales and outlandish stories. Those inclined to smoke or jaw or dip moved to the far edges of the clearing. Preacher Thompson did not approve of tobacco, and anything he did not make allowances for during the week, he doubly didn’t on Sunday. The men with the habit didn’t allow the preacher’s opinion to even slow them down, but just to save themselves from a potential lecture, they did move out of the pastor’s immediate line of vision.

The older children, eternally full of energy, scampered in and out of the men’s discussions and tore through the edge of the woods with great noise and plenty of laughter. Their younger counterparts, with bellies pleasantly full, napped upon quilt pallets laid out in a dozen locations throughout the yard.

“You’d best get yourself something to eat,” Myrtle Browning said to her. “Before the food gets so cold it freezes up completely.”

Eulie smiled at the little joke and could have suggested
the same to Mrs. Browning, though apparently even among the married women there was a careful hierarchy of who ate first. Or rather, who ate last. The most important woman among them would always be saved the dregs.

Eulie, having been responsible for her family from girlhood, had always thought herself to be an equal among the women. It was a surprise, and not wholly a pleasant one, to discover that as an unmarried female, she been kept apart. She had, in some sense, been isolated from the inner circle. Now she was unexpectedly welcomed with open arms. Her sister, Clara, had been handed her plate of food and shooed on her way, but Eulie was now expected to sit among the marrieds as one of them. It was a strange and heady feeling to be a part at last.

Eulie filled her plate and took her place on the ground. There were several empty chairs around, but she correctly ignored them. The eldest were still standing. A young woman, like Eulie, couldn’t think about a chair until they were all seated. The exception to this was Lulu Patchel, who was sat in a ladderback rocker with her new baby at her breast. The shapeless Mother Hubbard she wore had hidden button plackets in the side seams to allow her to bare her breast without any excess of fleshly exposure.

The baby was barely six weeks of age, and this was the first time most had seen him. He was almost perfectly bald, except for one straw-colored swirl at the crown of his head.

“What’s his name?” Eulie asked.

Lulu shrugged. “He ain’t got one yet, I reckon,” she answered. “I’m just calling him ‘the baby’ for now.”

“For mercy sakes, Lulu,” Miz Patch said as she popped a bite of bread in the young woman’s mouth. “It’s time to put your mind to it. The other children will get used to calling him Baby and then he’ll be thirty years old and shamefaced to hear his family holler for him.”

“It ain’t that easy,” Lulu declared with a full mouth. “The first one you got a name all picked out ‘cause you’ve been waiting all your life. The second one, well, that one you name after his daddy. My third one was a girl, so I was happy to pick out something pretty. But now here’s another boy. They ain’t hardly nothing left to call him.”

“Did you look through the Good Book, like I told you?”

Lulu nodded. “I did. And I even found a name I thought was real high-sounding, but Jonah didn’t like it.”

“What was it?” Miz Patch asked.

“Verily,” she answered. “Jonah said it sounded like a girl’s name. But I told him that Jesus was talking with his disciples and said, Verily I say unto you.’ There weren’t no women disciples, so Verily had to be the name of one of the men.”

There was no arguing that.

“I swear my back is near broke,” Gertie Samson complained as she seated herself across from Eulie. “My bones are so sore I can hardly get up and down.”

“What you been doing, Gertie?” Dora Pusser asked. “It’s too early to chop cotton.”

“Chopping cotton would be a treat,” Gertie answered her. “I been switching that Dudley from morning to night. I’m plumb wore out from the effort.”

“Young Dudley ain’t a-minding ye?” Garda June, Gertie’s mother-in-law, asked in surprise as she, too, sat down to eat.

“Not minding me don’t even commence to tell it,” Gertie exclaimed. “That boy’s mouth has turned so fresh, it’s all I can do not to slap it off his face. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

“How old is Dudley now?” Myrtle Browning asked as she brought her plate to join them.

“He’s just turned twelve,” the boy’s mother answered.

“Well, that’s what’s wrong with him,” Myrtle told her.

A titter of knowing laughter filtered among the older women.

“I think Myrtle’s got the right of it,” Miz Patch said “It a pure misery for a boy trying to turn into a man. And if he’s going to suffer, he’s sure to want his mama and daddy to suffer right along with him.”

“He’s always been such a good boy,” Dudley’s grandmother defended, looking accusingly at her daughter-in-law. “I’ve never had a lick of trouble with him.”

The women ignored Garda June’s observation. Grandparents could only rarely be counted upon for a realistic appraisal of their descendants.

“He’ll get past this,” Mrs. Thompson, the preacher’s wife, assured her. “You just have to keep steadfast and be patient.”

“How long is it going to last?” Gertie asked.

“About ten years, give or take a month or two,” Dora answered.

Mrs. Pusser’s words brought howls of laughter from the women. Her two boys were the wildest in the Sweetwood. In their middle twenties already, neither
showed any evidence of straightening up or settling down.

“So what am I going to do in the meantime?” Gertie asked them. “I can’t go on switching the tar out of him. He’s getting so big, he don’t even mind it. And considering the condition of my back, I think it actually does hurt me more than it hurts him.”

“Keep a bucket of cold water at the ready,” Myrtle suggested. “When he starts acting up, you just give him a good dousing.”

“Do you think that’ll work?” Gertie asked.

“My mama used to swear by cold water on my brothers,” she told her. “And it sure never done my own boys no harm, as far as I could tell.”

Gradually more women joined the circle until nearly every family in the Sweetwood was represented.

“I think he’s et his fill,” Lulu said finally. “Mother Samson, you want to burp him for me?”

Garda June moved to put down her plate, but Miz Patch stayed her hand.

“Let Eulie do it,” Miz Patch said. “She ain’t held the baby yet.”

Eulie was startled at the suggestion, but dutifully put down her plate and held out her arms for the small, sleepy child.

She lay the baby high upon her left shoulder and rhythmically patted him on his tiny back. The little body pressed close to her own was amazingly warm and sweet. Eulie felt a jolt in her heart for this child. Moss was leaving, and there would never be one of her own. She had not thought about what joy she’d be giving up. It came home to her now in the soft sweetness of a tiny human form.

“It’s said to bring good luck,” Miz Patch said to her. “You and Moss are going to want a family. They say if you hold another woman’s baby you’ll have one of your own within a year’s time.”

Mrs. Thompson looked up startled. “But isn’t she … I mean … I understood that you were already on the nest.”

Eulie felt two spots of color flame up on her cheeks. Was it confession time? Must she tell ill?

The decision was taken out of her hands as Miz Patch spoke.

“It seems that our Eulie was mistaken about that,” she said. “And we have none but ourselves to blame.”

The news was greeted with general astonishment, and Miz Patch’s accusation even more so.

“How are we to blame?” Garda June asked.

Miz Patch had risen to her feet and was lording over them imposingly.

“Eulie, here, was motherless among us,” she said. “Who would tell her how the mare gets a foal? Or how a happy rooster keeps the hens a-laying? With her mother buried in the ground, it was our duty to explain it to her, but not a one of us did The poor ignorant girl mistook what a little sparking and spooning could do to a gal’s figure.”

Wishing that the earth would open up and swallow her, Eulie kept her eyes to the ground as Miz Patch continued to berate the women for not taking better care of her education.

“I’ve spoken to Clara, myself,” Miz Patch announced “But we all need to remember to see to the twins and Little Minnie when the time comes.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Mrs. Thompson said
incredulously, “that all the time Moss Collier was swearing that he hadn’t, he really hadn’t.”

“Eulie?” Miz Patch asked.

She raised her eyes. All the women were looking at her. She couldn’t quite believe, awaiting her reply. Miz Patch was making it easy. She’d blurred the truth, taken on Eulie’s lie and made it almost too easy.

“He hadn’t,” she said finally.

She almost corrected her answer to “He hasn’t,” which was the full truth, but Miz Patch spoke up too quickly.

“It surely shows the truth that the Lord moves in mysterious ways,” she quoted. “If we’d talked to Eulie like we should, she’d never had accused Moss Collier. And with that wanderlust of his, he’d have never taken a bride.”

“It’s hard to believe it to be a misunderstanding,” Mrs. Thompson reflected.

“He must have been madder than a thousand furies,” Garda June stated with near-disbelief.

“But he sure seems pretty pleased with himself now,” Miz Patch pointed out. “I do think it might be good to mention the truth to the menfolk in private. The story is bound to come out one way or another.”

There were nods of agreement.

“So it all turned out for the best,” Lulu said in a dreamy, almost wistful tone.

“It certainly seems so,” Myrtle said, looking at Eulie almost accusingly. “Though how a woman could make such a foolish mistake is what I don’t know.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about babies the first year,” Miz Patch told her, cleverly turning the subject
of the conversation. “Moss Collier will get one on you soon enough.”

“She could be carrying already,” Dora Pusser pointed out. “They’ve been married a month.”

“You think you might be?” Garda June asked.

“Oh no,” Eulie answered. Then realized immediately that she had answered far too quickly. Obviously it was a question whose answer required some consideration.

The only thing she knew about … shagging … or being obedient to her husband was the desire she felt in her husband’s arms and what she’d been told. She racked her brains for something to say, some explanation of why she was so certain. She knew animals had certain seasons. But people seem to have their children at all times of the year. A woman could be barren, like Judith Pierce, but that wasn’t a thing that could be known so early. Eulie thought and thought and thought and finally came up with one fact she’d heard spoken by her Moss Collier.

“I can’t be carrying. My husband-man told me that a woman can’t get a baby the first time,” she announced.

Her words, rather than hushing the women’s questions, sent the group into a gaggle of disbelief.

Miz Patch widened her eyes expressively as if to warn Eulie that she’d made a mistake. Eulie had no idea how to fix it. Fortunately, Miz Patch came to the rescue.

“Well, that story is an old wives’ tale,” she said, a bit more loudly that was rightly necessary. “I don’t know why young people persist in believing it. But you’re just as likely to get a baby the first time as the hundred and first. Ain’t that right, Garda June? Didn’t you get with child on your wedding night?”

Garda June was whispering too avidly to have even heard the question. And the subject simply would not be turned.

“Do you mean,” Gertie questioned, “that in a whole month of marriage you two have only been together as man and wife one time?”

The woman’s incredulity was equally discernible on the faces of the others present. Eulie had gotten it wrong. She had made it worse. She had never been good at lying and it was getting her in trouble again. But somehow she couldn’t force the truth from her lips. It was private, between the two of them. She could not, should not, share it. If she told part of it, she might tell all of it. And Moss didn’t want her to do that.

“Oh!” Eulie feigned surprise. “I thought he meant the first time each night.”

Miz Patch gasped, but gamely covered it with a cough.

Fortunately, Eulie was saved from the need of making further explanation by the very loud and satisfied belch that emanated from the tiny baby.

All the women made congratulatory
ooohs
and
ahhhs
, as if the child’s ability to burp were the most amazing feat they had ever witnessed.

Every female present was looking at the baby, except one. Judith Pierce sat silently at the far end of the circle. She had obviously just finished her meal and was wiping her mouth with a dainty handkerchief.

Eulie, wishing desperately to turn the attention away from herself, and also still smarting a good deal from Mrs. Pierce’s unwanted intrusion into her family, seized upon the opportunity presented.

“If holding a new baby can get you with child, shouldn’t Judith Pierce hold the baby?” she said.

Around her the women looked surprised, perhaps even embarrassed. It seemed that they, too, had given up on the Pierces’ ever producing a child.

Judith’s face was pale and perfectly blank, almost as if she had no feelings on the matter at all.

“Of course Judith should hold the baby,” Miz Patch said.

She took the child from Eulie and carried him across the circle to lay him in Mrs. Pierce’s arms.

Judith looked down at the child. He was looking up at her, blue eyes wide open, little fists flailing, his tiny rosebud mouth making the sweetest baby sounds.

Mrs. Pierce was stone-faced.

Eulie was very surprised and curious at her behavior. Everybody who held the baby cooed and smiled at him. Judith was supposed to be so wild for a child of her own, yet, she just gazed at him with no expression at all.