Authors: Robert Morgan
I put on a jacket and tied a scarf around my hair. Clutching the envelope, I stepped out into the chilly breeze. Chickens scratched around the edges of the yard. The cotton mill whistle sounded three miles away. It was the end of the first shift. I wished Muir was there so I could tell him. He couldn't tell me what to do, but just knowing that he knowed would help. That's what a husband was for. When something bad happened he was supposed to be there, not off building army barracks at Holly Ridge or Wilmington or preaching at a church down there. It would be comforting to just let him know. Papa had come home for a long weekend, and Velmer had come from Columbia, South Carolina, but Muir had stayed in Holly Ridge to preach at a little church near there.
To get to the Squirrel Hill I had to cross the road and then the cornfield. The corn had been gathered and the stalks leaned this way and that. We'd cut the tops and pulled the fodder back in August, and the
stalks was mostly bare and broke. The field looked bad as I felt. I stepped around briars, going real slow. Every second I delayed give Papa a little more time of peacefulness. I wished I could just turn around and go back to the house.
It took me a minute to find Papa and Velmer in the woods. The Squirrel Hill was hit by lightning more than any place I ever heard of. Some said there was iron in the ground under the hill and that's why lightning always come down there. Every time there was a big thunderstorm a bolt hit an oak tree and split it down the middle, flinging splinters and limbs all over the woods. There was dead wood all around the hill to cut up. It was also a place the squirrels loved because of the acorns and hickory nuts, which was how it got its name.
Papa and Velmer was using the crosscut saw. It took a man at either end to pull the saw back and forth. They was cutting up a big limb that had been blasted off that summer by lightning. Papa seen me coming and he must have thought I brought bad news because he turned away like he hadn't even seen me. My breath was short from walking.
“Two men come to the house and brought this,” I said and held out the envelope. Papa looked at the telegram and sighed and put down his end of the saw. Fishing his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket he slid them on and read the words pasted to the page, then let the telegram drop to the leaves.
“Poor boy,” was all he said.
“What is it?” Velmer said. I picked up the paper and handed it to him. Velmer read it and shook his head. I was going to say Papa should go back to the house, but he'd already started. His head was down and he stumbled against a bush, and that was how I knowed he was crying. It was the only time in my whole life I'd ever seen him cry. He never cried when his mama died that I could remember. And he never cried when his oldest boy nearly died of typhoid. I followed him as he lurched between the trees and fallen limbs toward the house.
Now when we got to the house, Papa walked straight to Mama
where she set by the bread safe. He put his hand on her shoulder but she didn't even look up at him. I'd seen her do that before. She couldn't stand to be comforted, or show affection in front of anybody. He'd touch her, try to put his arm around her, and she'd just pay him no heed. I thought she was too shy to show her feelings when another person was looking. Maybe she thought her and Papa was too old to act intimate. But when she just set there paying no attention to Papa reaching out to her at that awful moment, I seen it was something else. She'd give her life to working for other people and caring for other people. She'd put up with Papa's whims and rages, and all it had led to was this. She'd lived on grits and molasses when they was young down on Gap Creek. She'd give everything to raise her children, and she had lost her favorite child. She didn't want to show no emotion anymore.
“Julie ⦔ Papa said as he squeezed her shoulder, but his voice broke and when he seen she wasn't going to answer he turned away and shuffled into the living room and set down by the fire.
“Mama, let me make you some coffee,” I said.
“Too late in the day for coffee,” Mama said. “I'd never sleep tonight if I had coffee now.”
“You could drink just a little; that wouldn't hurt you.”
Mama set there, and I wondered if she was going to stay in the chair all evening. It bothered me the way she wouldn't say nothing. Ever since I was a little girl it made me afraid when Mama was unhappy or disapproving. I guess that's the way girls feel about their mamas, much more than boys do. A girl has to be close to her mama, and the bottom falls out of the world when your mama is mad at you. Nothing can go right if your mama is angry. Even though I was a married woman it still seemed everything depended on how Mama felt. There was a big cold empty place in my chest as I watched Mama just set there like she wasn't noticing anything.
And then she looked up like she'd come back to life. “It's time to fix supper,” she said. “Look how late it is.”
“I'll fix supper,” I said. “You just need to rest.”
Mama ignored me and stood up, looking around the kitchen like she couldn't decide what to do first.
“You go on into the living room and rest by the fireplace,” I said.
Are you giving the orders here?” Mama said. A pain shot through me. Mama hadn't spoke to me in that tone of voice for a long time.
“I just thought you should rest,” I said.
Mama wiped her hands on her apron like she was drying them, though her hands, like her eyes, was perfectly dry. “This is my kitchen,” she said in a short voice like she almost never used.
“I just want to help,” I said and felt my eyes getting wet.
“Then you go down to the basement and get some beans and beets and a pan of sweet taters,” Mama said, like she was all business now and time was running out.
I got the saucepan for the taters and stepped out into the gray air. By mid-November it was already getting dark around five. The door to the cellar was at the front of the house. You had to stoop under the front porch to reach the cellar door. When Locke Peace had made the house a long time ago that's the way he'd fixed the basement. There was always cobwebs over the door and I brushed them aside. As I stepped into the dark cellar I remembered what I'd forgot, the flashlight. There was just enough light so I could see the shelves of can stuff. Since I knowed where the beans and beets was I got the jars and set them at the door. But the tater bin was at the back of the basement, and I had to feel my way there, trying not to stumble over any box or keg left on the floor.
When I was a little girl and had to go down there to get something, I always imagined snakes was watching me from the walls and shelves, big snakes with gleaming eyes. There was a smell in the cellar, the smell of old dirt and mold, of wrinkled or rotten taters, of dust and mildew, which I thought of as a snake smell. I shivered in the cold, sniffing the scent, and reached into the bin of sweet taters. Something
scurried away, and I jumped back and listened. All I could hear was pots banging in the kitchen above. My breath was short.
And then I remembered what had happened that afternoon and felt silly to be afraid of snakes or mice. Besides, it was almost wintertime and snakes was asleep deep in the ground.
“Troy is dead,” I said, not sure who I was speaking to. It just come out, “Troy is dead.” I said it to the dark in the back of the bin, to the smell of old dirt and mildew, to the dust. Troy had come down there as many times as I had to bring jars still warm from the canner or to get spuds for baking. He'd never come again for a can of peaches at grave level. “Troy is dead,” I said again and grabbed enough sweet taters to fill the pan.
When I got back to the kitchen Mama already had water boiling for rice. She'd made a cob fire in the cook stove and the kitchen was warming up. “You wash the taters and put them in the oven and I'll go milk,” she said.
“No, you can fix supper and I'll go milk,” I said.
Mama give me this hard look and I seen it was no time to argue with her. Papa still set by the fire, and Velmer had gone out to bring the horse from the pasture. There was nothing to do but humor Mama and try to help her. I run some water in the sink and started to scrub the taters with a brush. Mama poured some rice into the saucepan of steaming water.
The kitchen door opened and there was Aunt Daisy holding a bowl covered with dishcloth. Mama had lit the lamp on the table and the light reflected off of Daisy's glasses. She was married to Papa's brother Russ, and they lived just on the other side of the Squirrel Hill.
“Julie, I'm so sorry,” Daisy said. She handed me the bowl and I set it down on the table. “It's just some soup beans,” she said. The bowl was warm and I could smell the sweet beans in their broth.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I just heard the news from Velmer, and I'm so sorry,” Daisy said.
“Won't you set down,” I said. I glanced at Mama and at the milk bucket on the shelf. It was past time for milking.
“I'll go get the cow in,” I said and grabbed the milk bucket and flashlight. I still had on my scarf and jacket.
“Troy was an awful sweet boy,” Daisy said, and set down at the table. “I always said he was the best this family has seen.”
I slipped out into the twilight with the milk bucket. Velmer had gone to the pasture for the horse, but the cow was still at the milkgap, waiting for me. I put the rope around her horns and led her along the road to the barn. The cow was named Alice and she was a Jersey and the best milker we ever had. She had a tendency to get mastitis after she freshened and was nursing a calf. But otherwise she was a perfect cow. Jersey milk is richer in cream than any other kind of cow's milk.
Once I got Alice to her stall I mixed crushing and dairy feed and cottonseed meal in her feed box. The smell of molasses in the dairy feed was so strong it seemed to light up the dim stall. I got a bucket of water for Alice, too. Careful to avoid any fresh manure, I got the milking stool and set the bucket down under her bag.
Alice was nervous because she was used to Mama milking her and because I was late bringing her from the pasture. At first she didn't let down her milk easy, but as she begun to eat from the box and I leaned my head against the side of her belly and talked to her, she relaxed. A milk cow likes to hear her name said, and I said it again and again. And I told her Troy was dead and wouldn't be coming to the barn ever again. I told her she was the best cow and give the best milk we ever had, sweet golden milk with an inch of cream on top of every quart. The secret of milking is you don't squeeze the teat you pull down. I talked to her and she give down her milk so fast it shot into the bucket with every pull and foamed and filled the air with the scent of sweet warm milk.
“That's a good cow,” I said.
“Who're you talking to?” somebody said in the barn hallway. It was Velmer.
“Where have you been?” I said.
“I had to see a man about a dog.” It was what Velmer liked to say when he'd been out in the woods to do his business.
“Well you'd better water the horse,” I said.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Velmer said.
Two weeks before, I'd had a dream about Troy. Maybe not really a dream, more like a vision. It was a still night at the end of October and the crickets was loud, a weekend when Muir was home from Holly Ridge and we was staying in the Powell house down by the river bottoms. I was about ready to go to bed and had turned off the lamp, and Muir was already asleep.
It was the kind of night when there was just enough light to see by, though the moon hadn't come up yet. I was thinking about the war and all the bad news we'd heard about the Air Corps in England where Troy was stationed, how many planes we lost every day, though men sometimes got fished out of the channel or North Sea before they froze to death.
Troy had joined up in the summer of '41 when he was working at Fort Bragg with Papa and Velmer and Muir, building barracks. It was mighty hot there in August, and he watched the soldiers training, the paratroopers climbing ropes and crawling through mud while sergeants yelled at them, jumping off platforms and towers. Everybody knowed the war was coming. The war had been going on for two years overseas. Because he'd been in the CCC and studied welding and learned to use dynamite when they was blasting rocks on the Blue Ridge Parkwayâthey called him a powder manâmaybe they offered him a special deal when he went to talk to the recruiter of the Army Air Corps. Anyway, the next thing we heard was we got this card in the mail addressed to Mama saying her son Troy had volunteered for the Air
Corps and was training at the base in Georgia. Though she didn't say nothing I could tell it made Mama sick to get that little yellow card. She put it on the mantelpiece above the fireplace where it was still gathering dust.
After Troy was sent to England in 1942 we just got these little letters that had been photographed with half the words blacked out. When I seen Troy's girlfriend, Sharon, she'd say there was nothing in Troy's letters and rather than get such empty messages about nothing but weather and mud she'd sooner get no letters at all. That showed how she didn't think about nobody but herself. She didn't worry about all Troy was going through day after day. All we knowed was what they said in the papers about airplanes catching fire or getting shot down. But we'd get a card saying Troy had been promoted to sergeant with four stripes. And then one saying he had been raised to a master sergeant.
Troy sent me money to get Sharon a Christmas present. He sent ten dollars to buy her something nice, because he had no way of giving her something from way overseas. I went to the best store in Asheville, riding on the bus with all the soldiers, standing room only, and I bought the prettiest comb and brush and mirror set you ever saw. It was amber and brown and gold, the finest vanity set you could get. Because of the war, stores didn't have as much stuff as they used to, so I was lucky to find it. Would you believe Sharon didn't even like it? She said if Troy wanted to get her a present he should get it hisself. Just sending money and letting somebody else buy it wasn't the same. I was ashamed for her, to think that she didn't care what he was going through in those dark days over there.