The Day of Small Things (21 page)

The snow has been falling for days but we have pulled the feather tick into the front room by the stove and piled it high with quilts. We snuggle there in the warmth and he tells me how he worked with the WPA, building roads around mountainsides over in Avery County. He has made good money and reckons that, now times is better, we might put money towards the farm that’s for sale down on the branch.

For I have told him that I don’t want to stay here. As long as he is by me and there is light, I can’t hear Mama. But sometimes, when I wake of a night, I can hear her screaming.

I have told him most of it—how Mama killed Snowflower and about the paper that said a doctor was going to cut out some part of me so that I couldn’t never have babies. I have told him how she died and that I ran away because I was afraid the neighbors would take me to that doctor.

In a way, it was hardest to tell him about Gudger’s Stand and the dancing but I made a clean breast of it, though it took several days and many tears. It was midafternoon and we was under the quilts by the stove. Outside the snow was flying, beating against the windowpanes, but we was safe in our nest, finding warmth in one another.

When we was done, I begun to tell Luther something of where I’d been after crossing the river. At first he thought I was funning with him. But as I talked on, he went to shaking his head, saying, “No, no … you in a place like that?”

And when I come to tell him about the tango I had done with Francine, he threw off the quilts and jumped up and begun to put on his clothes.

“Luther, I didn’t never go upstairs with none of them—I promise you that.”

I was setting up now, a-clutching at his britchie leg with one hand and holding the quilts over my breasts with the other, but he paid me no mind, just went to pulling on his boots and his heavy coat.

The tears was beginning to come and they dripped down my face onto my bare skin. “Luther, I had to do something. I couldn’t stay here and I was afraid to go far.”

He shook his head and bit his lip like he was trying not to cry. Then he jammed on his old hat, pulling it down hard.

“I got to get outside,” he said, his voice all choked. “I got to think.”

And he was gone, slamming the door behind him. I could hear his boots crunching in the snow on the porch and the creak of the loose step and then I couldn’t hear him no more.

There was naught but the crackle of the fire in the stove and the little rustling sounds of the old house around me. As I listened hard, almost holding my breath, hoping to hear the sound of his footsteps returning, I seemed to hear the tinkling voices of the Little Things beating against the windowpanes and calling to me, but then she began to speak, low and mean like she used to do,
whispering that Luther’d not come back, that no one could love a crazy girl who—

I made myself as small as I could and pulled the quilts up over my head. I pretended it was Granny Beck’s love wrapped around me and tried not to listen to the things that Mama was whispering.

The fire in the stove has sunk into coals when at last I hear the squeak of the front step and the sound of boots on the porch. I peek out from under the covers and see Luther as he comes in the door, stomping the snow off his boots. He looks over at me and smiles, just as sweet.

“I brung you your Santy Claus,” he says and reaches into his coat pocket. Stepping over to me, he lays two oranges and a big old peppermint stick down on the quilt, then drops his coat to the floor and sets beside me.

He tells me that he decided to walk down the branch to see if the store might be open for he was of a mind to buy some meal and side meat if they had it. The rats had been at the meal in the kitchen bin and we’d not had bread all this while.

“The store was open,” he says, “and there was several fellows setting by the fire and jawing. When I come in, one of them knowed me for I had done some work for him last year. He hollered out to ask what I was doing over this way.”

Luther goes to peeling one of the oranges and my mouth begins to water at the sharp sweet smell. Brother used to get me an orange for Christmas.

“What did you tell him?” I ask, feeling that all the rest of my life is hanging on the next words he speaks.

He pulls the orange apart in sections and puts one to my lips.

“Well,” says he, “I remembered what you said, about the note you left, saying you was gone to your brother’s. So I told those fellers that we met by chance on the train, both of us coming back to Marshall County, and we found that we agreed so well that we got off and got married in Asheville.”

I bite into the orange section and the taste of it is like joy in my mouth.

“So this is what we do—we give out that you’ve been at your brother’s all this time, and you and me go into town and get married tomorrow or as soon as we can.”

I throw my arms around him and kiss him with my orange-tasting mouth while he goes on talking.

“You’ll likely heir this place, you and your brothers and sisters, and we’ll stay here till I can fix us a new house down by the road. You’ve been away from folks too long.”

He kisses me gentle-like and says, “All that other, we’ll forget all about it and start new.”

I kiss him back hard, my eyes a-swim with tears. He goes to building up the fire, still full of what all he heard at the store—that some say there is like to be another great war overseas, that there is to be a clinic with a doctor in Dewell Hill, that the old feed mill in Ransom caught fire but got put out in time.

“And the High Sheriff—that one everyone hated so bad because he helped foreclose all them farms—they said he got run over by a train a few weeks back of this—killed outright, they said, and good riddance to him.”

W
hen I learned that High Sheriff Hudson was dead, I felt like a great burden had been lifted from me. Now, I thought, there is no need to tell Luther about what happened that night by the river. I have told him about staying at Odessa and Inez’s house, and about Mr. Aaron who made sure that we would find each other again. But now Luther just looks at me with a question in his eyes when I talk about that night and the black car and the black man.

For him, the story that is real is the story he told the people at the store, that we met on the train. When I remind him of the full moon nights up in the burying ground, he looks puzzled and scratches his head. “Well now, Birdie, if that’s how you remember it …” he will say and go to tickling and teasing of me.

It stayed bitter cold through the end of December and it isn’t till the first week of January in the new year of nineteen and thirty-nine that the weather moderates and we can go into Asheville and stand up before the magistrate.

There is some trouble about my age and me not having any paper to say who I am, but Luther talks to the feller real low, and when they shake hands, I see the edge of some bills sticking out between their palms before the magistrate puts his hand in his pocket and motions to me to come up to him and get married.

We walk all around the town for we have a good bit of time before the train to Ransom goes, and we eat lunch at the S & W Cafeteria, where you can get more different things to eat than I had knowed there was. You go down a long table with all the different things there in big pans and you point at what you want. I get a piece of white meat chicken and some corn and some beans and a fancy glass that has two kinds of Jell-O in it, both red and yellow, with stiff whipped cream on top. I reckon this is the way that rich people, queens and such, eat every day.

There is a black man dressed up fancy who carries our trays to a table and pulls out my chair for me to sit in. He seems very nice and I ask him does he know a feller named Rafe but he just shakes his head.

I have a ring too. Before we went to the magistrate, we went to Finkelstein’s pawnshop and Luther bought me a little gold band that has leaves on it. Even while I am eating, I keep looking at my ring.

It has been a long day. I was worried both times we had to pass through the depot at Gudger’s Stand that someone might see me and take me for Redbird Ray, but I kept my hat pulled down and my scarf up around my face against the cold and neither time did I see a familiar face. Another time it will be easier still, I think, as me and Luther walk across the bridge on our way back to Dark Holler.

There is a full moon rising up above the mountain and the air is not so cold as it was. I had slept most of the way back, my head on Luther’s shoulder, rousing now and again to look at the gold band on my finger. Luther was dozing too and he had asked the conductor to be sure not to let us miss our stop.

Now, though it is late, I feel wide awake. Walking in the moonlight with my husband—my husband!—is as fine a thing as I can imagine. It is hardly cold at all, the weather acting like springtime to match the feeling in my heart.

“Luther,” I say, catching at his hand, “let’s take the road by the river and go home by way of the burying ground. I want to tell Granny Beck about us getting married.”

“Little Bird, you are a sight on earth,” he says. “Whoever heard of a bride spending her wedding night in a graveyard?”

But, like me, Luther is giddy with the moonlight and he gives in directly.

“Well,” he says, “I reckon it’ll be nice to follow the river. I like to watch the way the light plays on it. But I can see I am going to be one henpecked husband.”

By the time we are climbing the path up to the burying ground, the moon is riding high. I make my way straight to Granny Beck’s grave with its circle of five smooth stones and flatten out my palms on the earth above her heart. “Hey, Granny Beck,” I whisper. “I’m back.”

I tell her what all has happened but not out loud for Luther is setting on a nearby stone, rolling a smoke. He
sets there patient, smoking his cigarette, and when I have told her all about it and felt the warmth of her happiness and love, I rise up and go to set beside him.

He puts his arm around me and we set there a minute without speaking. Then he says, “I been studying on things, Little Bird. All this that’s gone before, what you told me about your mama. And then the things that granny of yours taught you—Injun charms and spells.”

I start to speak but he lays a finger against my lips. “Now, all that is part of why folks called you quare. And you living up in the holler, you and your mama keeping solitary, well, it didn’t much matter what you did. And I ain’t saying a word against your granny for I know how much she meant to you. But we are going to go to live down on the road, amongst folks, and it seems to me that, along with forgetting about when you was living at that bawdy house, it might be as well for you to forget all them witch things your granny taught you. It don’t square with scripture, Little Bird.”

He kisses me sweet and gentle. “Will you make me that promise—for a wedding gift?”

And so I promise.

And in time to come I will gather up my few memories of Redbird Ray—a bracelet and a fancy pair of rhinestone hair combs—along with the first bits of writing that Granny Beck showed me, some with the words to the spells, and Luther will dig a hole up at the burying ground under the big oak and we will bury my past there—the quare girl and the dancing girl.

In later years, when he is making markers for my angels, I take a fancy to have a marker for them girls. He shakes his head, not understanding the need I feel, but
wishing to lighten my sorrow, he does like I ask and fashions the marker. On the side that is buried is the name
Redbird
and on the side looking at the sky, it says
Least
.

Miss Birdie