The Path Was Steep (12 page)

We passed through the somber city and raced down the Montgomery highway. At Alabaster, a town of lime kilns, most of them idle now, we turned into a dusty road, ran a few miles, then began the ascent to Pea Ridge.

Eight miles from Montevallo College, Pea Ridge was a hundred years away in ideas then. Older women wore long dresses with long sleeves. They thought makeup sinful, and “bobbed” hair, too. They wore their hair tightly skewered into a bun on top. Most faces had an honesty and cleanness that was as pleasing as any beauty they lacked.

David’s mother, Granny we called her, was sitting on the porch with Papa when we drove up. She looked very beautiful to us, tightly skewered hair and all. Her long-sleeved dress was the blue of her eyes. Starched and ironed, the dress was clean and crisp, as dresses had to be then. Papa was too thin, with a long chin, fierce blue eyes, and pepper and salt curls. (Ours was really a curly-headed family.)

Buddy, the baby, had died since we left. Granny sunned* his clothes weekly, wetting the trunk lid with her tears. He was nine when he died. “I’d bring him back any time,” she told me, showing me his clean, starched clothing.

Hubert and Huey, the twins, sixteen now, rushed from the backyard. Willard followed them. Vera, the youngest, grabbed the girls. We sank once more into the joys of home and family and love.

David’s sister Meadie Smith and children came from Boothton to spend the day. The third day of our visit, we sat on the porch, the gnat smoke going full blast to keep gnats and mosquitos from bothering us. Granny saved every rag all winter to burn in summer. She rose now, soused the dipper in water, took a drink, poured the remainder over a geranium in a pot, and sat back down. “Mamie said the boys are sure growing,” she smiled.

David winked at me. We knew instantly that she wanted to go and visit.

“Flora lives next door to her, in Acmar,” Granny said. “It is just seventy miles from here.”

Sharon, holding a white cat, sat on the steps beside Vera. Davene stalked a young rooster. Sated with cornbread, field peas, chicken, and blackberry pie, we drowsed and talked.

“Dave,” Papa stared at the late sun. “We’ll chip in and buy gas if you’ll take us to Acmar.”

“I’ll buy the gas,” David said.

There was an immediate clamor to go. A trip anywhere was a great luxury. “I promised Thelma she could go,” Granny said. David winked at me. He knew this had been planned. His sister Myrtle came up. “I am going,” she announced. Hubert, Huey, Willard, Vera, everyone wanted to go.

“The car will hold ten,” David announced. “That is all.”

Ten! I thought, and looked at the hot, brassy sky.

Papa always awoke about 3 A.M. By seven the next morning we’d eaten breakfast, washed dishes, swept the floors, and were dressed and ready to leave. We were to pick up Thelma and her son James in Dogwood.

Perspiration wet my forehead. I sat close to David and settled down into the inferno. Air-conditioned cars were unheard of then. Granny crammed herself against the door. Davene grumbled about room, then sat forward inspecting the chickens as we passed. Sharon, Papa Pickett, Myrtle, Thelma, James, and Willard squeezed into the back seat. A cloud of dust boiled behind us as we sped northward.

“Dave!” Papa’s voice trembled. “Your wife and children are in this car!”

David increased his speed.

“Oh, Dave!” Thelma, his oldest sister, gentle, sweet, and—from her voice—now terrified: “You’ll kill us all.”

David, having driven the Marytown road to Welch time and time again, and then having driven safely over the Jumps, had total confidence in his driving ability. “Anybody’s afraid can get out,” he said.

No one, apparently, was afraid.

Papa bent forward, face red, dusty, and as stubborn as David’s. He nodded angrily, and beads of sweat mustached his upper lip. Knuckles white, he clung to the doorknob. Thelma rested her head against the back seat and closed her eyes. Her lips moved. Myrtle, with quicksilver temper like Papa’s and David’s, flushed a dull red. “Dave, if you want to kill us all, go ahead.”

David went ahead. In just two hours we reached Acmar, found Mamie’s house, piled out of the car and onto the porch. Mamie came out and grabbed David first. Flora, next door, saw us and ran. More hugging, kissing, laughter, and tears. Then Mamie, accompanied by Granny, went to forage in the garden. The sisters helped, and the table was soon loaded with squash, corn, tomatoes, sausage, biscuits, and a peach pie. We did full justice to the meal, sweating away in the oven-like kitchen. I felt blood kin to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

“Hottest day I ever saw,” Papa said, his face almost as red as the eye of the coal cookstove.

Stuffed and wretchedly hot, we managed the dishes. Then, steaming like a Florida swamp, we migrated to the small front porch. Hottest day I ever saw, too, I thought, and for a treacherous moment I longed for the coolness of West Virginia. Blasting sun wilted the vegetation and reflected in the road in shimmering heat devils.

Too numbed almost to dread the trip home, I endured the heat, longed for my sister Thelma’s open hallway, and remembered the giant, cool oaks of Piper. My vagueness left in a burst of homesickness.

Papa rose, poured water into the washpan on a plank shelf on the porch, washed the sweat from his face, and dried it. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he urged. “Bound to be a storm. Never saw it so hot.”

Even though I was used to large families, Southern hospitality, and visiting; for a moment I thought that we overdid the kinfolk bit. Was a few moments’ visiting worth all the crowding, jolting, and sweating?

“I’ll be ready in a few minutes,” Mamie said from the bedroom. I turned to look. Granny was washing John A.’s face, and Mamie fastened a suitcase, then handed a sack to her oldest son, J. D., who was eight. “Take this to the car, son,” she said, and began to wash Jack’s face, which, at the moment, was almost as red as his hair. Thunderbolt couldn’t hold five more!

“Mamie?” Papa asked hesitantly. “Reckon there’s room?”

“Of course,” calmly.

“We’ve figured it out,” Granny said. “I’ll hold Jack [he was five], and Sharon can stand between Sue and me. Mamie will hold Jerrold [the baby].”

Like sardines, fourteen of us crammed into the five-passenger car. Four grownups sat in the back. Five children sat on them or stood with heads, feet, and elbows in the way.

Davene sat in my lap—hair, neck, and body wet with sweat. She took a nap, then woke as mad as a copperhead. She pushed at Sharon, who had no room to move. Granny mopped her face, then wiped Jack’s, pushing the fiery red hair out of his eyes. All of us were cross and snapped at each other. Thunderbolt coughed and lurched along. His engine, under my blistered feet, seemed boiling hot.

The children in the back quarreled and pushed for room. David stood this for a time; then a blast of profanity silenced us. The endless, dust-fogged road shimmered mile after hot mile. The air that filtered in to me burned my face. My dress was wringing wet. Sweat ran down my arms and legs. I sat as small as possible to give David room. For once I was glad of his speed. One way or the other, we would soon be out of our misery.

Then a thundercloud boiled up suddenly and spread menacing wings across the sky. Wind fluttered through a field, gained speed, and swooshed through the car. Oh cool, enchanting wind! Then lightning cut a ragged hole through the sky and wrote its name down the side of a tall pine tree. Thunder, like the voice of God, named us all as sinners, and rain sluiced down on us.

The children screamed. Thelma prayed again. God had named, then spared us. We scrambled to pull down curtains, but the rain found slits and washed us clean. Thunderbolt, cooling, went faster, split a sheet of water in the middle of the road and rocked into a mudhole. Valiantly, he dug a trough, slid sideways, almost turned over, righted, and spun mud from the rear wheels. Deeper and deeper the wheels dug into the mud. David turned off the motor, stepped out of the car, slogged down into the mud, and spoke his mind.

“Son!” Granny said fearfully.

David hadn’t finished. Heads stuck out, and we stared at the mud. “Don’t just sit there!” David’s wrath blasted us. The rain had curled his hair all over his head, his teeth gleamed, and his eyes were the angry purple of the clouds.

“Son,” Thelma explained. “I’ve got on my best shoes.”

“Me, too,” Mamie and Myrtle said.

Granny opened her door, stepped out, and slogged to the side of the road. Papa took one of the children and followed her. I slipped out of my white pumps and splashed through the mud to hand Davene to Granny.

David started Thunderbolt. Papa and I stood in the slush behind the car and pushed. The wheels bit deeper. Yellow mud decorated our faces. We pushed harder. The car moved an inch, gained speed, and crawled out of the mudhole. Finding a puddle beside the road, I smeared dirt from my face and feet; then we jammed back into the car.

Long before dark, we arrived safely home, untangled, and spilled from the car. “I’m starving,” David said. I put a gentle hand to his mud-smeared face.

The boys piled wood into the woodbox. Granny fired up the stove and washed her hands. The rest of us took turns at the washpan and tub. “Dave, catch us a chicken or two,” Granny said.

“Dave’s going to run down a chicken!” Vera called. We all crowded into the yard to see the show. When David caught a chicken, he literally ran it down. No coaxing with feed. Just as he attacked every chore, David, with grim determination, ran down a chicken. He started after it, lightning fast, and no matter how the poor bird changed course, David was behind, as if reading its mind. Like doom, he followed until the chicken was caught. Why we never entered him in the Olympics, I shall never fathom.

In record time, he captured two young roosters and wrung their necks. While I ran to gather and shuck fresh corn, Myrtle and Mamie plucked the chickens and cut them up. Granny made a blackberry pie and biscuits. The table and cooktable were cleared. In a very short time we sat down to chicken and gravy, biscuits, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and pie. Depression? Oh, yes! Papa Pickett sometimes worked all day for a bushel of corn to make meal and feed the cow and chickens. Corn sold for sixty-five cents a bushel. Now and then, he and the twins found a day’s work cutting timbers for the mine. They had almost no money.

But there was no hunger here—not in summer, with a matriarch like Granny who kept chickens, a cow, and pigs, and saw that a garden, heavily fertilized with manure, was planted and every weed and blade of grass pulled as it appeared. Shelves were already lined with canned blackberries, pickles, tomatoes, peaches, beans, and corn. Cows roamed the countryside, coming home nights to be milked. Sweet potato vines, corn shucks, and a handful of meal was sufficient food for cows in summer. Hens scratched most of their food from the earth, eating grubs, crickets, worms, grasshoppers, and termites in rotting wood. There were no termites in the houses then. Chickens devoured every one they could find.

Pallets lined the floor that night. David and I slept on a spare mattress which we dragged to the front porch for coolness. The stars were bright. A cool breeze came from the west from our beloved Piper hills. Oh, how I yearned to see them! Not for just one day, but to wake each morning and look out my window to see the beauty everywhere. We’d started housekeeping in Piper, and we loved that small coal-mining town more than any other place on earth.

“Like to go to Piper tomorrow?” David must have read my mind.

“Yes! Oh, yes!”

12

Such Good People

After breakfast the next morning, we dressed and were on our way. Every bend in the road was familiar. Trees, heavy with dust, leaned over the roadside. Briars turned orange-blighted leaves towards the sky. Sumac’s red berries shone through a coat of yellow dust. “We are going home,” the dust whispered to me. I rubbed David’s arm, proud of the rippling muscles. A miracle was sure to happen, and he would find work.

But our return put a dead, desolate weight on my chest. The people I loved best in the world, next to family, were existing somehow on three and four days’ work a month. There were angry, bitter, and hopeless tales. One that rankled above all: a group of men had gone to the head of the company to ask for credit. “Our children are hungry,” they told him.

“Let them eat mussels, plenty of mussels in the river. Let them eat hickory nuts,” he told them.

“Yes, we stole a calf from a pasture,” a friend told David. “The man had plenty more, and our children were hungry.” He almost boasted of the deed.

The hardest thing for us was to see their resignation—a waiting patience, numbed, hopeless. “This dust is terrible!” David said as we started up the river hill. “One thing about West Virginia, it rains so much we don’t have dust there.”

“Yes,” I agreed, too heartsick to defend Alabama.

The next day it was time to leave. Granny cried; Papa’s face was red. My eyes were as dry as cottonballs. On the way to Morris, though, the floodgate opened.

“Don’t cry,” David said uneasily.

“But they were hungry,” I wept.

“Things will get better,” he promised. I had seen him slip a dollar to one or two friends, was glad, and trusted that we’d have sufficient left to buy gasoline for the trip home.

As we drove up to Papa’s, there was a crowd on the porch. Granny Mosley was at home. She’d been visiting Uncle Gus and Aunt Josie in Winston County. Little Granny wasn’t pretty, but she was so pure in heart, so humble, she was a blessing to everyone. Her small, wrinkled face wore the scars where a crazed neighbor had cut her long ago. It must have been her soul, so big the frail body could scarcely contain it, that made you smile when you looked at her, and you were a better person and the world was better because she lived.

The scars didn’t worry her. She told how the neighbor had had a mental breakdown. Granny was staying with her while the husband went to the mill. That night she woke to find herself lying in a pool of blood. The neighbor, standing over her, screamed. “Someone has tried to kill you, Sue! I’ll cut his heart out!” Totally unaware that she had cut Granny, she stood guard all night, axe in hand.