The Truest Pleasure (14 page)

I was too dazed to know what to say. I had been feeling such a relief and glory when Tom grabbed Jewel and jerked me out
into the dark. It was like my mind had gone empty with confusion.

“If you have to make a fool of yourself, and me,” Tom finally said, “at least you don't need to scare the baby half to death.”

Jewel was still screaming, but she slowed a little in the dark, the way a baby will when the worst of its fit is over. Tom rocked her and talked to her and walked among the horses. But I never thought men had a way with babies. Men like young children, but I never noticed they had a touch for quieting infants.

“It never hurt a baby to go to service,” I said.

“This baby ain't going no more,” Tom said.

“Be careful you don't commit the unpardonable sin,” I said. I had been sweating, but the night air made me shiver.

“Ain't me that needs to take care,” Tom said.

The horses was restless. They shuddered and whickered, and shook their harness. It sounded like the peepers down by the branch was answering the preacher.

When Pa come out he didn't say a thing to Tom. Even Joe and Lily was quiet when they got in the wagon. Jewel had finally gone to sleep, and Tom handed her to me before taking the reins. Nobody spoke as we drove in the dark. It was like a black curtain had descended around us. I could smell the milk souring on the front of my dress.

The next day we was both still mad. Our sulks and snits before had been little things. They didn't amount to more than bee stings that end up itching. What happened now was cold venom rushing in us and pouring over everything. I don't know where such poison could come from. I think it surprised
Tom as much as me. In our fighting we got fancy and cruel. It was like we become different people. What Tom had seen at the camp meeting made him doubt everything about me. His confidence in me was shattered. He acted like he thought I was crazy.

“Such goings-on is heathen,” he said at dinner.

“Worship of the Lord is not heathen,” I said.

“My folks never held with such,” he said.

“Then I pity them,” I said.

“Nobody needs your pity,” he said.

I was putting on a pan of cornbread. I slammed the pan on the plate upsidedown and the cake fell out smoking and crisp.

“Such meetings take place only in the dark,” Tom said. “They don't happen in the honest light of day.” I tried to remember any Holiness services I had seen in the day. I was sure I had.

“People have to work in the daytime,” I said. Because Tom was such an early-to-bedder he wouldn't approve of any meetings at night, I thought. He was drowsy by eight o'clock. His sleepiness seemed a simple-minded thing.

“You won't go again,” he said.

“I'll go if I want to,” I said.

“Then that shows the sin of this thing,” he said.

“Only to them that are blinded.”

“The Bible says a woman must honor and obey her husband.”

“Not when the husband is blinded by worldliness and greed.”

“Greed?”

I saw I had gone too far, but it was too late to take it back. It was something deep inside pushing me, something I couldn't see. “Yes, greed,” I said. “For this place.”

“Then keep your place, you religious fool,” Tom said, his voice low and near breaking. He stood up from the table leaving his grits half finished. Grits and butter was just about his favorite thing. He walked out the back door without closing it.

Anger is among the sweetest feelings people know. That's why they cherish it and feed it and remember it so long. Anger is like a tightening and sharpening of sight. It is the brightest angle from which to look at things. Jewel started crying and I had to pick her up. I was so mad I didn't feel like nursing her. I told myself if Tom wanted to put his foot down I would show him I was more than his match. I was both scared and thrilled at the idea of a fight. I told myself he hadn't seen anything until he started matching wits and will with me. I was so excited it took me several minutes to calm down enough to nurse the baby.

All day I worked around the house and made up in my mind things I would say to Tom when he come from the field. Again and again I went back and forth about what I ought to tell him. Sometimes I thought I would say it was too bad we had quarreled over something good and sacred, and that we had agreed on things so far except the tent meeting. And I wanted to say I didn't think he was greedy and I was glad he had married me and had the place.

And then the anger swept through me again as I whisked around the hearth, and I wanted to shout in his face who did he think he was, telling me not to go to camp meeting? When
he come back at suppertime I would tell him he could keep to his ditch-digging and rail-splitting and going to bed with the chickens. I had more things to do with my life than just grubbing for a little money.

But Tom never come in for supper. Pa and me eat our beans and taters and cornbread and the plate I set for Tom stayed empty. When I cleared the table I left it there for him. But he didn't return from the field till milking time, and then he got the buckets from the back porch and went right to the barn.

I left his plate on the table, and the beans and taters and bread in the stove, and dressed for meeting. Pa got dressed too. Tom still hadn't come and I wrapped Jewel in her warmest blanket.

Pa went out and hitched the horse to the wagon, and just as we was about to leave Tom come back from the barn. He set down the foaming buckets and walked to the wagon. “You're not taking the baby,” he said. I held Jewel close in her clean bonnet.

“Give her to me,” Tom said.

I hesitated a moment, and then handed the baby to him. I didn't want to scare her by arguing.

All the way to Crossroads I thought about the baby screaming after I had left. She would cry for at least half an hour. Tom would have to let her cry while he strained the milk into pitchers and carried them to the springhouse. She would bellow as he scalded the buckets and then got his supper from the stove.

I knowed that as he carried the squalling baby to quiet her he would consider his options. I understood Tom well enough to know he would think of shooting both Pa and me, and he
would be both surprised and disgusted with hisself. He might ask the preacher at church to intervene, but that wouldn't do any good. I knowed exactly how Tom would think of going back to the Lewis place. And he was also thinking about going west, to Iowa, or Kansas, the wheatfields of Minnesota, or to California. But that was not his way, to leave what he'd started, pick up and run off among strangers. I knowed him better than he understood hisself.

The place and the child was all in the world he had to show for his almost forty years. He really had no choice but to stay and do his work and make a better place for hisself, as much as he hated it. I saw how he was thinking. He would compromise and make his decision. He would take a middle course.

Sure enough, when we got back late that night I saw he was not in bed. Jewel was in the cradle but Tom was not to be seen. I took the lantern and climbed up to the loft, and there he was. He had fixed a pallet of quilts and blankets and was sound asleep. I don't think he ever knowed when we come home.

Over the next few weeks Tom and me discovered new levels of hate and spite in ourselves. Outwardly we lived much the same as before. We did not sleep together and we did not touch each other. But we got more familiar in new and irritating ways. We each criticized everything the other did. There wasn't anything about Tom that looked right to me. If he got ready for church I kept him waiting until it was too late to get to Sunday school. I did my best to keep Jewel away from him, to have her asleep when he come in after milking. I warned him not to wake the baby.

“I had no intention of waking the baby,” he said.

“Just walking in those heavy shoes will wake her,” I said.

Tom put in longer hours than ever in the field. He worked by hisself most of the time. He started jobs at dawn and was done or mostly done before Pa ever joined him. He planted corn in the bottom on his own. He hoed and plowed, and planted a patch of watermelons in the loam by the river. He protected the melon vines against frost with sacks, and he put in an extra acre of cane and a garden twice as big as before. He hoed the corn three times before laying it by. I had never seen fields so clear of weeds. The madder he got the harder he worked. It was like he was trying to prove the land was his, that he had earned it.

But he knowed it was the best way to fight me, to work hard and prosper. I could read books, and I could go to meeting, and I could spite him, but I couldn't prevent him from prospering. He figured that out early. What he had to do was work and thrive. He growed big watermelons by the river. And he cut corn tops and pulled fodder so the fields was neat as flowerbeds.

From the extra cane he made more than two hundred gallons of molasses. By mid-November he had sawed and pulled in on the sled enough firewood for the winter. He sold molasses to neighbors, and he sold firewood. He sold watermelons, and he sold apples and cider. There was nothing I could do to stop him from working. It was his way of heaping coals on my head.

With the extra money Tom bought wire, the new kind with four barbs to the knot, and he begun to replace rails around the pastures. He started to clear ground at the upper end of the bottom. The Peaces hadn't cleared new ground since the war.

It made me mad to see him work so. Everybody noticed what he was doing. They said he was making the Peace place pay. They said he was making Pa's living for him. Tom didn't say anything at supper at night. Sometimes he went to sleep in his chair, and then climbed on up to the loft while Pa and me talked by the fire. He played with Jewel a little if she was still awake.

By the time the revival closed in the spring it was like there was a light over the countryside. The Spirit was there, and the mountains seemed to shine. It had been an awakening, and the churches had better attendance. I've heard that after a great revival people can't walk into a valley and not feel the Spirit there. It's like the hours and minutes are blessed. The mornings are changed, and dew is lit and pure. In spite of my quarrel with Tom I went through each day with a light heart, knowing I would go to a meeting that night. Didn't anything matter except the meeting to worship and praise. It was the purpose of everything, to praise. It was like falling in love with everybody, being married to the world. Nothing cleanses like shouting and speaking in tongues. You feel clear and free as a spring pool. Some mornings I walked along the river just for the joy of it.

When we was children Florrie and me would play down at the river. Sometimes we fixed a picnic basket and took it to the rocks at the shoals. We took boiled eggs and cookies and apples, and set on the rocks in the water to eat them. There was something thrilling about fast water, and the roar of the shoals was surprising, no matter how many times we had been there.

By myself I liked to walk along the still pools of the river beyond our fields, and into the woods up toward Cabin Creek. It soothed me to mosey on the banks where the water was slow and green. In fall leaves dropped in the river and appeared to float above water they was so dry. In places the bank was scratched by muskrat slides. The woods by the river looked dark as a cellar.

Pa said the Indians named Green River in their own tongue, and white people took the name from them. We lived so close to the head the river wasn't wider than a creek. It started as a spring eight miles to the west and swung through a long valley. At the shoals it poured through a slot between mountains.

Pa said the river run on almost a hundred miles to the east. He said it run fast through Green River Cove as it dropped out of the mountains into flat country. He said his great-great-grandpa that fought at Cowpens and Kings Mountain lived on Green River down there where it run into Broad River. When that end of the river was settled there was still Indians in the mountains.

Sometimes I would set by the river and watch the water. The pools had a shiny green skin. Around sticks there was lips of ripples. Rings and curls passed over deep pools. In clear shallows minnows sprinkled this way and that way.

I watched eddies where the river turned back on itself. Along the bank, water with lather and sticks on it was moving back upstream, going fast in places, then getting slow and coiling, and caught by the main current again. In places water got trapped in a pocket and turned and turned for hours.

When I walked the river trail I could feel the ground shook by current. Above the shoals the bank trembled with the roar,
like there was a furnace under it. The trail turned through laurels and climbed to a little bluff, and when you come down to the rocks there was the water foaming. The sight made me shudder.

The mountains rose straight up on either side of the shoals. From below, the slopes looked black. There was pines and hemlocks that stood by the water and pointed into the sky. And pines rose up the sides of the mountains, among the rock cliffs. The tops of the ridges was ragged and pointed with pine trees.

In summer there would be a long snake sunning itself on the rocks. It was almost the color of water, and when you got close the moccasin poured itself into a crevice.

The day I fell in love with the shoals I was standing with my feet in water, below a big rock. It was like the water was talking, quoting scripture or muttering a poem. The river pulled at my feet heavy and powerful. The surface appeared to sort and resort a puzzle, scattering pieces and gathering them again.

But I was looking at the tall hemlocks pointing straight up the side of the mountain. I looked through the tops of the lower trees toward the pines further up, right to those on top of the ridge. And then I saw a cloud moving. It was just a little cloud in the clear sky, but white as snow. And it was like I was standing and looking right up the ladder of trees into heaven.