I guess he was embarrassed about our quarrel, for he didn’t even answer. He strained the milk through a piece of floursack and carried the pitcher out to the springhouse. I’d never seen him so quiet. I cooked grits and fried some eggs and pieces of shoulder meat. When we set down to eat I said, “Can’t you get a job at another cotton mill?”
“Ain’t another mill in walking distance,” he said, “except Tigerville.”
“Then get a job at Tigerville,” I said.
“I’ve already tried,” Hank said.
“We could move,” I said.
“Move where?” Hank said.
“Move closer to another cotton mill,” I said.
“That’s for me to worry about, not you,” he snapped. He put his coffee cup down and looked angry at me. I froze inside. I was just trying to be helpful and cheerful. I didn’t say nothing else. I looked at my plate and eat my grits. I remembered what Ma Richards had said about Hank being spoiled, and about him quitting when things got hard. I saw that he got mean when he thought he wasn’t in charge. He would get scared and mean if he thought he wasn’t the boss. When he was angry it was better for me not to say nothing, even if I was mad too.
The wind had died down during the night and I listened to the fire pop and mutter in the stove as I put some jelly on a biscuit.
“They’re building a store in Pumpkintown,” Hank said. “But that’s nearly ten miles away.”
I didn’t say a thing. I would just let him do the talking, if that made him feel better. I’d let him talk all he wanted to. It was having the last word that was so important to him. Since he was raised by
Ma Richards it made sense he would feel that way. He paused like he expected me to say something. I didn’t.
“There are houses going up here and there,” he said. “I could ask for work on one of those jobs.”
I listened to wood settle in the stove, and a crow cawed somewhere on the ridge above the creek. A hen cackled in the chicken house.
“We could go back to North Carolina,” I said.
“Where would we live?” Hank said. “There’s no room on Painter Mountain, even if we wanted to live there. I don’t think we can live with your mama and all your sisters.”
“We could find another house up there,” I said.
“And what would we use to pay the rent?” Hank said.
“Gap Creek is fine with me,” I said. Because he was worried, Hank wanted to pick another fuss. It was something he was used to. When you’re unhappy you find a way to get angry and make somebody else angry. But I wasn’t going to fall into that habit.
“We might just stay here for a while,” he said.
I got up and started gathering the dishes into the dishpan. I scraped the plates into the slop bucket and put the leftover biscuits and meat in the bread safe. “I’m not worried about staying here,” I said.
“Nobody has asked us to leave,” Hank said.
I THOUGHT HANK would probably go off looking for another job that day, but he didn’t. Instead he took Mr. Pendergast’s shotgun and a box of shells from Mr. Pendergast’s bedroom and put on his mackinaw coat and cap. “I’m going to get us a wild turkey,” he said. But he didn’t look happy about going hunting. His jaw was set in a grim way and he looked like he just wanted an excuse to get out of the house.
“I ain’t seen any wild turkeys,” I said.
“The wild turkeys is up the holler,” Hank said, “up the branch, way back toward Caesar’s Head.”
AFTER HE WAS gone I cleaned up the kitchen. And then I decided to have a look around the place. With no money coming in from wages, I had to know what we had to last the winter. I would be eating for both me and the baby, and I had to see what there was to get us through till the spring, assuming we was allowed to stay in the house till spring. I didn’t have but thirty-six cents in my purse, and I didn’t know how much Hank had in his pockets. But whatever it was, we would soon run out of cash. I was not going to ask Mama to help us, unless there was no other way, and I was not going to ask Ma Richards for anything. But if there was enough stuff on Mr. Pendergast’s place, we might make it through the winter anyway, until the baby was born.
I lit a lamp and took it down to the cellar. I doubted that Mr. Pendergast had done much canning on his own. But his wife must have at one time. I had seen those jars down there before.
I held the lamp high over the jars and looked around the musty basement. There was old boards piled above the bank, and a dough board with mold on it. Mold growed white as baking soda on the beams. And then I seen the bin of taters. I had forgot the bin of taters. There was two bins actually, Irish taters and sweet taters. The spuds must have been dug in mud for they had dirt crusted on them. They was little taters, but there might have been two or three bushels of them. Only problem was some had already begun to get soft and wrinkled. The skin of the taters was puckered in places, like they had been dug a long time ago. I squeezed several and some was soft, but most wasn’t rotten. I’d have to pick through the pile and get rid of the rotten ones.
The sweet taters looked cleaner, like they had been dug in dry dirt that crumbled off them. Sweet taters look more like roots than Irish taters; they look swelled up, like big blood vessels. Some was perfect as a football, but most was crooked and wrenched around. I picked through the sweet taters and found them hard and cold, like they had been dug that fall just before we moved to Gap Creek.
There was a few old buckets and rusty hoes in the cellar, but I couldn’t find nothing else that could be eat. The basement looked like it had long been forgot, a place that was about to be buried under cobwebs and low sills and joists. I climbed back up the plank steps to daylight and blowed the lamp out. The fresh air tasted so good I breathed deep to get the cellar taste out of my mouth and nose.
Next I inspected the corncrib. It was a regular old-time crib made of two-inch slats with wire mesh nailed to the inside. It was the kind of crib with slanted sides, bigger at the top than at the bottom. There was moss and lichens growing on the slats, showing how old it was. The door was a crawl-through door, more than waist high. I pulled out the peg that held the door and looked inside.
A basket on the floor held some ears of shucked corn, and a bucket of shelled corn set beside it. It was the corn I used to feed the chickens. But most of the crib was filled up with a great heap of unshucked ears. I guess there was a wagon load of corn there, the shucks gray and weathered. Grains scattered on the floor had the hearts eat out by weevils, like beads that had been drilled through. I climbed in and took an ear and pulled the shuck back. Some of the grains had been hollowed out and some not. The corn must have been two or three years old, and some of it was not fit to use. But there was enough good corn to make some meal, five or six bushels anyway.
There was strings of dried peppers hung on the back porch. But I wondered if there was anything else on the place to eat. Wasn’t
anything in the woodshed but wood. I knowed what was in the springhouse. That left the old smokehouse where we had put the ham and shoulders and middles on the day of the hog killing. There was some jugs on the bottom shelves of the smokehouse I wanted to look at. I opened the door of the little building and let the sunlight fall on the floor where the ashes from hickory fires was heaped. The salted meat laid on the shelves, and the place smelled like salt and uncooked lard. The smell of salt made you think of cooked meat.
The jugs on the lower shelves was heavy earthenware. I lifted one up and took it out into the sunlight. It was the kind of jug you think of as holding moonshine. I pulled the wooden stopper out and sniffed. It was the smell of sorghum, rich, maybe overcooked sorghum. I tilted the jug and a tongue of molasses licked out slow through the mouth. I dipped a finger in the dark syrup and brought it to my mouth. It was sorghum all right, with a golden redness inside. No blackstrap syrup, or cane syrup, but sorghum with its special smell. It was a little overcooked and thick, almost rubbery in the cold air. But the molasses could be warmed up, and they had the right flavor. There was four jugs of them. That would last through the winter, with syrup for biscuits and cornbread, as well as sweetening for cakes and gingerbread. There was molasses to be put on cornmeal mush in the morning, and on oatmeal.
The only place I hadn’t been to was the barn loft. I knowed what was in the feed room on the ground floor, the barrels of crushing and dairy feed and cottonseed meal, the bag of shorts for the hog, the laying mash and oyster shells for the chickens, sweetfeed for the horse. The steps to the loft was outside the feed room, and as I climbed the steps I seen two dusty china eggs on the shelf by the harness. Old horse collars and plowlines, hames and trace chains, singletrees and doubletrees hung on nails. Mice scurried around the sacks and coils of rope as I climbed.
The barn loft was a great room open to the rafters. The roof was
held up by poles, and there was heaps of sweet, moldy hay in the center, near the hatch where forkfuls could be throwed down to the ground. Mice trickled along the eaves, as daylight sparkled through cracks. There was a pile of shucks in the corner, and grains of corn was scattered on the floor where ears must have been piled at one time.
I looked to the side of the hay pile and seen something with a wick, like the tip of a giant candle. Stepping closer I seen it was the stem of a winter squash. There was maybe ten squashes there, acorn squash and winter squash. They was hard and cold. And then I seen the pumpkins. They wasn’t big pumpkins like you make jacko’-lanterns from. They was sugar pie pumpkins, not much bigger than the squash. I counted seven of them.
Standing beside the hay pile I smelled something sweeter than the hay. It was just a whiff, a trace. I looked around but couldn’t name the scent, except I was sure it wasn’t just the smell of old seasoned hay. I searched in the gloom and found the perfume come out of the straw. It was the scent of apples. I poked around in the edge of the hay pile until I touched something hard. There was round, hard things under the straw. I pulled the hay aside and seen the apples. They was spotted gold and orange apples. They was what Mama called “horse apples” except a little bigger than horse apples. They had been gathered from the tree at the side of the barn. Mr. Pendergast must have gathered them and hid them in the hay. The apples was sticky with natural wax on their skin, and they had hay dust stuck to them. But they was firm, fresh fruit. Must have been a peck or two of them, buried in the hay waiting to be made into pies in January or February, as long as they stayed cold. I picked up an apple and wiped it on my sleeve and bit it. The flesh was yellow, sweet and coppery, an old-timey taste. The firm flesh turned to juice as it was crushed.
While I was eating the apple, I looked around the loft and seen a string of what looked like tinsel hung from the post on the left.
Looking closer, I found they was beans, dried beans still in the pod and threaded together to stay dry. There was yards and yards of beans. They looked like bunch beans and cornfield beans that had been dried. They had dust on them, but they could be washed and boiled to make soup, to make soup beans.
But the strangest thing I seen in the barn loft was this old basket, a split hickory basket, made like a saddle, with high ends and bulges on either side. It was the kind of basket you don’t hardly see anymore. Inside was all these little paper bags closed with clothespins. There must have been twenty of them. The bags looked wrinkled and reused many times. I was going to open a bag when I saw there was writing on the side of it. Somebody had wrote in pencil “Blue Lakes” on the brown paper. I opened the bag and found it was white bean seeds. Other bags said “Half-Runners” and “Barnes Mountain Beans,” “Big John Beans,” “Seay Beans,” “Brown Speckled Beans,” “Long White Greasy Beans,” “Edwards Beans,” “Goose Beans,” “Greasy Cut-Short Beans,” “Johnson County Beans,” “Lazy Wife Beans,” “Logan Giant,” “Nickel Beans,” and “Ora’s Speckled Beans.”
It was a basket of old bean seed, sorted and labeled. Mr. Pendergast’s wife must have left them there. They was all ready to be planted. If I stayed till spring I would put them in the ground.
WHEN I CLIMBED down from the barn loft I tried to think what else I might look for that could be eat. There was the cow and the horse and the dozen chickens. But there was no guineas and no sheep on the place. Maybe Mr. Pendergast had buried some cabbages. It would mean a lot to have fresh cabbages to eat in the winter. And if I had enough heads I could make sauerkraut.
After the wind of the night before, the sky looked like it had
been scrubbed and polished. The air was clean and everything sparkled. The creek shimmered where you could see it between willows, and the yellow leaves still on the hickories flashed across the pasture.
I always loved the late fall. The cool air was thrilling and the purple leaves on the oaks and gum trees was a feast for the eyes. Here and there on the other side of the pasture a sumac bush or sassafras was bright red, like a touch of lipstick. But the woods was yellow and gold more than anything else. The woods looked painted, like a rainbow had crashed onto the mountain and spilled its colors down the valley. Since we had moved to Gap Creek, and since Mr. Pendergast was burned in the fire, I had been too busy to get out and look over the place. I had been to the hogpen, and to the springhouse, and to the toilet, but I had not walked out to the end of the pasture. I had been too much in the daze of being married, and moving to a strange place, to look around Mr. Pendergast’s property. And I hadn’t felt much like poking around for the fun of it.
Where somebody has buried cabbage, all you see is the roots sticking out of the ground like pigtails. Cabbages are buried upside down. I looked in the stubble along the edge of the garden, and in the edge of the orchard beyond the hogpen. There was loose dirt and weedstalks where the taters had been dug up, but I didn’t see cabbage roots. I searched along the pasture fence beyond the smokehouse and didn’t see no buried heads there either.
At the milkgap I climbed up on the bars and jumped down on the other side. The grass in the pasture had been cropped short by the cow and horse, but indigo bushes growed here and there. For some reason stock won’t eat indigo, as long as there’s anything else to graze on. There was cowpiles scattered over the pasture like big brown buttons. The barbed wire fence looked old and needed
patching. In places rails had been nailed between poles where the wire had rusted and broke. The fence leaned this way and that way and staggered along the edge of the woods.