The Truest Pleasure (28 page)

And then there was the time I got interested in sewing. I never had took to making clothes as other girls do. People said I didn't take care of myself, because I didn't have anybody to teach me. But one time I just fell in love with making white blouses. I never had had any fine clothes. But that time I must have made a dozen blouses, each one with a different pattern of lace and ruffles, some with mother-of-pearl buttons. I made ivory-colored blouses, and sparkling silk blouses, white as snow.

When my interest in something fades it's like my temperature drops, and I am normal again. I'm not hardly aware when it happens, until one day I realize I'm going about my work and not feeling the sweetness and pain of a passion. But it is the time just before I fell in love with something that I look back on with such feeling. It is a kind of homesickness. I try to recall the time just before I discovered herbs and white blouses. It is the rush of discovery I try to remember and relive.

I'm asking you because you have studied doctoring and books on the mind. Do you understand this? Why when I was intense and in love with the study of herbs and growing and drying them for tinctures and concoctions, was I calm and happy? I was so happy I even wept for the ignorance that led to the joy of learning.

Then comes periods when nothing makes sense. It is like nothing I do fits with anything. Everybody is going about their lives and don't seem to realize how awful things have got. I see nothing but desolation because nobody cares for me. Pa and Joe and Florrie are all going ahead with things. You have your work and friends. That's when I see I don't have any friends. I have gone so long without caring for anyone they have forgot me.

When I'm confused I feel too weak to work. And nothing seems worth the effort. The next moment, the next hour, is like some mountain to scale. I can't see where to put my foot for the next step. When you feel bad it's like you are blinded and can't see where to go. Knowledge won't help, and no book will help you.

That's when I need the fellowship of the Spirit. That's when only the meetings can make me feel better.

Does this make sense to you, Locke?

I found that by thinking of others I could help get myself through. By helping out, or giving to someone that needed it, I could make myself feel better. When the Short younguns all had smallpox I sent dinner every day for near two weeks. And I did washing to help Shirley MacBane and her husband that had dropsy.

But the thing that lifted me most out of the dumps and blues and vapors, more than work or new discoveries, or charities, was the revivals. Once Pa took me to the first one it was like I had found a new part of myself. When I spoke in tongues or danced and shouted it was like a force greater than me lifted and filled me. I was freed from the tangles and shambles of life. There is no other way to describe the feeling of being cleansed through and
through when the Spirit takes hold. You are carried away, lifted up, and something greater than you has you in its grip.

And afterwards you feel this great love of ordinary things.

What I feel after a service is greater than any pleasure I ever had watching the stars at night, or sunset over the valley, or the first greens in spring on the ridge across the river, or reading any book. Only thing that even comes close to the joy of Holiness is the joy of loving, and I've come to think they are really much the same. I don't know how the pleasure of the flesh could be so similar to the pleasure of the Spirit. But it is.

I'm not sure what I'm asking you to do, Locke. I'm not asking you to explain me to myself, and I'm not asking you to talk with Florrie and certainly not to talk to Tom when you are home. He wouldn't understand.

This is turning out to be the longest letter in the world. It's been four days since I wrote the above, and I'm taking up my pencil at night, after the younguns are asleep.

Sometimes I wonder if Tom don't have his own black studies and confusions, and he just never talks about them, or even knows how to talk about them. I wonder if he don't get just as tired and weak as anybody, but covers it up with hard steady work.

But the thing I worry most about with Tom is what he really believes. Sometimes I don't think he believes anything at all. I think he is trying to stuff all the wealth of the fields and weather into a bag of money. He is wringing the fat and sugar from the dirt the way a druggist gets the extract and essence from a leaf or root. But I know that's not really so, for he loves the place itself too, and the work itself.

Those we know best we know the least. They are so close we can't see them. I feel married to a foreign being, and I don't know what he means or wants. I don't know what we have to tie us together. Sometimes I can't remember why I married him.

I wish I knowed how our people back in old times thought about religion. Did they believe as we do? Did they have churches at the beginning? Revivals are something recent in the mountains, since Pa come back from the War. But it's hard to believe they did not have brush arbors back yonder. Maybe they worked too hard in those days clearing land to have time for the joy of meetings.

I think about this because I wonder how steady over the long time our beliefs are. I feel part of something that goes on forever, but I can't be sure it's what others have felt.

It worries me that others have not heard the gospel, that most people in the world have not heard the plan of salvation. But I can't think as some preachers say, that everybody that's not been baptized is going to hell whether they ever had a chance to know better or not. That would not make sense, that people would be lost that never had a chance to believe.

But that brings me to another of my worries. If people in ignorance are not going to be lost, then what is the purpose of sending all these missionaries to convert them? Do you see my point? It can't work both ways. Either they are not damned in their ignorance, or they are. So I can't make sense of it. I've asked Pa and he can't explain it. As you can see, Locke, I'm saying things I've never told to anybody.

Locke, I envy you men, able to go where you want, to join the army and find an occupation, to travel and buy up a homestead
in Arkansas or Texas if you want to and start all over. Maybe that's my favorite dream, of going away and starting all over.

But I don't think I really want to go either. I don't think I could leave here, or that there is another place I could be happy, much as I want to believe it. When I've gone to Greenville or to Asheville with Pa I ain't seen any other place I'd like to live. I wouldn't mind going for a few days, to that hotel in Asheville where honeymoon couples stay, where you can look all the way to Pisgah from your window. But it would be for just a few days, to get away from the kitchen and hot stove.

One of the things I love about Tom is the way he is drawed to this land. That attracted me from the first, how he was attached to this place. We have felt the land was almost a burden. But through Tom's eyes I saw what a beautiful piece of ground it is.

Sometimes I feel such love of the place I just stand and look at the yard running down to the fields, and the fields down to the hazelnuts on the river. I stare at the trellis Tom made for roses and the sandbox he built for Jewel and Moody by the chimney and filled with river sand. Even the flowerbed that needs weeding seems intimate and perfect. The shed Joe made beside the crib for Pa's wagon shines silver with weathering. I think the room I set in is like a pyramid, and has the power and focus of a crystal. It is my room and everything is located around it.

When I look at the yard, even under the moonlight, I feel close to Great-grandpa Peace who cleared the place up long ago and set out arborvitaes and hemlocks, magnolias and junipers. And I see where Tom has trimmed the boxwoods and pruned the cherry tree by the chickenhouse. And I feel how
people work together across time, just as sure as if we was all together. Even you, way out in the Pacific, doing your nursing, are working with us.

It don't bother me, Locke, that you talk about Darwin and Ingersoll and Emerson and other agnostics and infidels. I don't worry about what you read and study about. What does worry me is that you are so far from home out of reach of our affection. I hate to think what being alone might make you think and feel. That is one reason I have been writing this long letter, to let you know you are not so alone way out in that army hospital on the other side of the world. You are right here in my thoughts just like you was setting on the sofa and telling funny stories.

If you have any ideas that can help me, let me know.

With love through Christ, your sister

Ginny

Somebody has been cutting timber on the ridge,” Tom said. It was early November and he had gone up to the summit orchard to pick the last apples before a freeze ruined them.

“Where on the ridge?” I said.

“Just beyond the orchard, out along the ridge and just under the ridge,” Tom said.

“You mean on the other side of the summit,” Pa said. “Our line runs right along the top.”

A sick feeling soaked through my back and down into my legs.

“The timber is cut on this side of the ridge,” Tom said.

“Surely not,” Pa said. “Do you know where the line is?”

“I know where the top of the ridge is,” Tom said.

“I should have showed you just where the line is,” Pa said.

“Maybe somebody made a mistake,” I said.

“Sounds like it,” Pa said.

They agreed to go look first thing in the morning. As I put supper on I felt all hot and rushed. Pa didn't say any more, but I could tell how bothered he was. There had been a boundary dispute with the Johnsons years before and it had come to a trial finally. Pa never liked to talk about it. The Johnsons owned the other side of the mountain, and they had quarreled
with their neighbors on every side. Old man Thurman Johnson believed that somehow he had been cheated by surveyors and had never got the land called for in his deed, so every few years him and his sons would claim a few more feet on one side or the other. One of his sons had been killed years back when they disputed with the MacBanes about their western boundary. Nobody ever proved who did the killing. But it had been twenty years since the Johnsons had give anybody trouble over property lines.

“You'd think people would respect boundaries that have been here so long,” I said. “The line is where it always was.”

“What is a line?” Moody said.

“It's where our land ends and theirs begins,” I said.

“Are you going to shoot them?” Jewel said to Tom. Recently she had tried to avoid talking to me.

“Nobody's going to shoot anybody,” I said. “We don't even know what's been done yet.”

I've always cringed at talk of boundary feuds because they never really get settled. If somebody believes he don't have all the land he should there is no way to persuade him otherwise. Even good Christian people get filled with hate. So the fussing and lawsuits go on and on. There was neighbors in the valley that hadn't spoke for thirty years. They carried boundary quarrels into church work and politics. Their children got in fights at school. They took shots at each other out squirrel hunting, and stole timber off each other's land. People otherwise accommodating, deacons and pillars of the church, dumped trash and run cattle on each other's corn patches. Women had got in fights down at the store over a few feet of scrubland.

I had always told myself I would never be involved in a boundary fight. It was too simple-minded. Better to give away a few feet of dirt than ruin your life feuding with a neighbor.

“How much timber have they cut?” I said to Tom.

“It's hard to tell. I saw maybe twenty stumps, and the laps and sawdust where they had sawed up the logs.”

“We have oaks on that ridge,” Pa said, “never been cut.”

“They have now,” Jewel said.

“Be quiet,” I said. “We don't know that for sure.”

But while Jewel and me cleaned up the table, and while I set by the fire reading, I couldn't think of anything but the line on the mountain. I told myself to be calm, but anger rose in me like vapors off vinegar. I told myself to wait and see and not get riled before it was clear what had happened. The Christian thing was to give the benefit of the doubt, love your enemies. But my words didn't have any effect on the anger growing in me.

What could you do if somebody took part of your land? Even if it had been in your family a hundred years, it appeared they could just step across the line and take it. The Johnsons had give trouble to my grandpa, and great-grandpa. Surely there was a way to put a stop to their wickedness. They had the advantage that the mountain was so far from our house. It was almost an accident Tom had been up there to see where they cut the timber. My anger rose till I was astonished. I couldn't have explained the fury that roared in me. I felt betrayed. My deepest privacy had been invaded. I was as mad as if my children had been harmed, or my trust took advantage of.

“The Johnsons have done this one time too many,” I said to Pa.

“Tom and me will go up and see what has been done,” Pa said.

“We'll all go,” I said.

“No, Tom and me will go,” Pa said.

That night I laid in bed thinking about the land on the mountain. I almost never went there except to pick apples. I wasn't even sure myself where the line was. It run along the top, but a ridge is not as sharp as the comb of a roof. And I wasn't sure I had ever seen where the corners was. Tom kept the road up to the orchard, and the field around the orchard, mowed. But there was woods up there he had never been in. Pa used to hunt squirrels on the mountain, and Joe had trapped foxes there. I knowed there was a holler with a spring at its head, and a cliff called Buzzard Rock further out the ridge. And there was another cliff called Hog Rock where hogs used to gather out of rain. It had been years since I had seen those places. We once climbed up there as children for a picnic on top of Buzzard Rock. There was a cave under the rock blackened by fires of hunters and maybe Indians. Joe found a tomahawk in the leaves below the rock.