“Watch out, Carolyn!” I yelled.
“What?” she said and looked toward me. I pointed at the skirt and she seen the smoke coming from the fabric. She screamed and run back from the flames.
“Don’t run,” I hollered.
She shook her skirt like she was trying to shake the flames out of the cloth, but that only made the fire take hold. Carolyn started screaming.
“Hold still,” I said. But she kept backing away into the muddy cornfield. I picked up wet dirt in both hands and throwed it on her skirt, but it didn’t smother the flames enough. Carolyn kept backing away and shaking her skirt like it had bees in it. I wondered if I could tear the dress off at the waist.
“Watch your shawl,” I said. But Carolyn was too scared to listen. She was screaming and backing into the muddy stubble. The flames was climbing up toward her waist.
“Lay down and roll in the dirt,” I yelled. That was her only hope. But she didn’t listen. She fought the flames with her hands and the ends of her shawl.
Just then Hank come running across the field. He had been at the lower end where the branch runs into the creek. “Lay down!” he hollered to Carolyn.
But Carolyn was too panicked to hear anything. She turned to run across the field, with the smoke and fire crawling right up her dress. “Please, Lord,” I prayed. “Don’t let anything happen to Carolyn.”
Hank run right up to Carolyn and pushed her down on the ground. Then he grabbed her arm and rolled her over. He took her shoulder and rolled her over again. I run up and started throwing wet dirt on the skirt. Hank grabbed up handfuls of dirt too and we covered the flames until there was nothing but muddy cloth and smoldering. I pressed mud into the smoke with my fingers.
“Are you burned?” Hank said to Carolyn. But Carolyn was crying so hard she couldn’t answer. She had mud on her face and pieces of stubble stuck to her tears and in her hair.
I lifted the muddy hem and seen her legs was not burned. There was not even any holes in her stockings. Her dress was ruined and her shawl was covered with mud. But it didn’t look like she got burned at all.
“You’re all right,” I said. Carolyn kept on crying and I helped her up. Hank got on one side and me on the other and we started walking toward the house.
“Oh leave me alone,” Carolyn said and flung our hands away. She walked out ahead of us so we couldn’t see her face.
THAT NIGHT I woke in the dark and thought there had been a noise. I remembered there had been a loud noise. But since I had been asleep I couldn’t recall what it was. I listened to the house creak and to the roar of the waterfall up the valley. It was impossible to tell what time it was. The dark was so thick it felt like two or three in the morning.
I rolled over on my side trying not to disturb Hank. When I got up to pee I tried not to bother him. Once he was woke up it was hard for him to get back to sleep. My belly felt a little uneasy and I reached out to turn myself again. But I reached out further than I had meant to, into Hank’s side of the bed. And that side was cold, and empty.
Maybe the noise I heard was Hank getting up. But the sheet beside me was so cold he must have been up a long time. I listened to the dark house and thought I heard a noise. Setting up in bed I listened, and it sounded like there was a groan or moan somewhere in the house. There was a knock, like wood had hit wood.
Should I get up and see what was happening? Had Hank took sick in the night? Had he gone out to relieve hisself? He did not like to use the chamber pot in the bedroom except in the worst weather. But he had been gone too long to just be relieving hisself. Should I get up and see what had happened to him? Maybe I didn’t want to see what was happening. Sometimes it’s better to let well enough alone.
Then I heard somebody talking. I thought it was Hank’s voice, but it was still so low I couldn’t be sure. It was like somebody whispering almost. And then I heard the moan again, like an “Oh” drawed out. And somebody said, “Shhhhh.”
I told myself I should not go look. And then I told myself I had to see what was going on. Whatever was happening was happening in my house. Had somebody arrived in the night? Had Lou and Garland come back from Greenville early? Had Hank took sick?
The bed groaned when I got out of it, and I stumbled on the cold floor. It was so dark I had to feel my way to the wall where my robe hung on a peg. I tied the robe around my waist and stepped quietly as I could to the door. From the living room I could see there was a light in the kitchen. And I could hear low voices. It was definitely Hank and Carolyn muttering about something.
I stood and listened and then thought it was bad to spy on them. If I stood and eavesdropped I would show how suspicious I was. I stepped forward still trying to be quiet. When I got to the door of the kitchen I saw a lighted lamp on the table. Carolyn was setting in a chair and Hank was bent over her with his arm around her. “Take this,” he whispered to her. “It’ll make you feel better.”
I must have bumped into a shelf when I stepped into the room, for a pot rattled on the wall. Hank and Carolyn jerked around to see who was there.
“What are you all doing?” I said.
“We didn’t want to wake you up,” Hank said.
“Wake me up for what?” I said.
“Carolyn has a terrible colic,” Hank said.
“I think it was the smoke I breathed that made me sick. I have a pain down here,” Carolyn said and rubbed her lower belly.
“I have fixed some soda water for her,” Hank said.
“You should have waked me,” I said.
“Carolyn didn’t want to wake you,” Hank said. “She was trying to be considerate.”
“I just feel bad,” Carolyn said. There was tears in her eyes.
“Soda water won’t do her no good,” I said.
“Oh!” Carolyn cried out.
“You go on back to bed,” I said to Hank. “This is a problem for women.” There was a look of embarrassment on Hank’s face. He took a step back.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.
“You don’t need to do nothing,” I said.
I got kindling from the box and tossed it in the stove. And I poured some water in the kettle. “I’ll make a hot water bottle for you,” I said to Carolyn.
“Won’t do any good,” Carolyn said.
“Sure it will,” I said.
I set up with Carolyn for about an hour while she sipped hot tea and held the hot water bottle to her belly.
“You have been good to me,” she said.
“You are my little sister,” I said and put my arm around her shoulder.
Nine
A package come to us from Mama later that month, just a week before Christmas. One of the Hensleys that was driving a wagon load of hams to Greenville stopped by the house to leave it. It was Mama’s Christmas presents for me and Hank: a cardboard box with jars of jam and preserves and honey. And there was things Mama and Rosie and Lou had sewed for the baby. Mama had crocheted a blanket and made several little gowns with embroidery on them. Rosie had knitted booties and a little cap. Lou had made a baby quilt. It was the prettiest little quilt I had ever seen, with orange and brown and yellow squares with a green underside.
I got all the pieces out and laid them on the sofa to look at. Tears come to my eyes when I thought of all the work Mama and my sisters had gone to to make those things.
There was one other present in the box. It was wrapped up in tissue paper and had Hank’s name wrote on the paper with a pencil. But I could tell what it was. It was a pocketknife. Mama had gone down to the store at Flat Rock and got Hank a new knife.
“Hank, look what Mama has sent you,” I said.
“I didn’t ask for no Christmas present,” Hank said.
“She wanted to give you something,” I said. “It’s Christmas.” It was a fine knife with a bone handle. Hank tested the sharpness of the blade with his finger, then folded the knife and put it in his pocket.
After Lou and Garland had come back and picked up Carolyn, Hank had got moody again. He would go for days without hardly saying anything. I didn’t say much either when he acted like that, for I had learned that when I tried to cheer him up he just snapped at me, like a dog that has been hurt and don’t want to be bothered. It grieved me to see him so unhappy, and to know there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
WHEN IT WAS three days before Christmas I made up my mind to decorate the house, even though we didn’t have any money to buy presents and had not felt like celebrating. It was a cold morning without any frost, and I told Hank we ought to get a Christmas tree. And put some holly and mistletoe in the living room.
“Nobody will see it,” Hank said.
“We’ll see it,” I said.
I wanted to make Mr. Pendergast’s house feel like a home that Christmas. I imagined the baby, even though it was unborned, would somehow know there was a Christmas being celebrated, and that it was in a home where people loved each other and give each other gifts and celebrated the birth of Jesus. And I thought trimming the parlor and fixing up a tree might make Hank feel more like his old self too. He had lost faith in hisself. And because he had lost his job, and was ashamed of hisself, it kept him angry. And because he was always angry, I was beginning to get angry. I had to try something. I guess my own patience was starting to run out.
“I’ll go out looking for a tree,” I said, “but you’ll have to help me carry it in.”
It was one of those mornings when my belly felt gray inside and off balance. When I was grinding coffee on the back porch I could hear my stomach muttering. While I was frying eggs and boiling grits, my belly was starting to churn, but I swallowed hard and moved real slow. And by the time I had got breakfast on the table I felt a little better. I had found that if I went slow enough the sickness would pass.
I set down at the table with Hank and sipped some coffee. I wouldn’t feel like eating breakfast until later in the morning.
“You’re not in no shape to go looking for a Christmas tree,” Hank said.
“I’ll be all right directly,” I said.
“We don’t have to have a Christmas tree,” Hank said.
I felt you couldn’t have Christmas without a tree, and you couldn’t end one year and start another without a tree with candles on it. It was hard to say why I felt a tree was so important. But I didn’t want to live through Christmas in a house without a tree. I wanted to do what needed to be done. “I want me a Christmas tree,” I said.
“I’m going down the creek to look for muskrat sign,” Hank said. “I may do some trapping later.”
It took just about an hour for my stomach to settle down. I sipped the coffee and nibbled on a biscuit. Then I washed the dishes and set the rest of the breakfast in the bread safe, to eat later. I put on my coat and tied a scarf over my head and got out my old gloves that I used for chopping wood. It was cold outside and there was plenty of sun, winter sun. But you could see clouds gathering in the north, over the ridge. I got an old saw from the shed by the barn and started across the pasture, going slow so as not to make myself sick again. The best place to find a Christmas tree was in a growedover field, where the pines and cedars had come up full and thick. I’d seen such a field beyond the pasture, beyond where the salt block was at the foot of the mountain.
In the field beyond the pasture there was mostly blackberry briars and dried weed stalks. The goldenrod stalks give off thistledown when I touched them, a glittering smoke that drifted in the breeze. There was pines scattered here and there among the brush, but they was mostly yellow pines, bastard pines Papa used to call them. Yellow pines and black pines don’t have any shape for a Christmas tree. And their color is not so pretty either as a white pine. I was looking for a white pine, or a cedar. A cedar is fuller and stronger for holding ornaments, but a white pine has that icy blue color and is usually rounded and pointed at the top.
It was on the other side of the field that I found the white pines. They had been planted there by two big pines that loomed on the ridge above. There must have been a dozen little white pines scattered among the scrub. And in the weeds there was dozens more seedlings, growing in the stubble like blue sparks of needles. I looked for the right one. Each seemed to have something wrong with it. One was too lean and too long between its levels of limbs. A white pine grows its limbs in a circle around the stem, one set of limbs for each year it’s lived. Another had been crowded by briars so it was lopsided. And another had lost its top. Some trees was too little, and one was too tall. Some didn’t look round enough.
I searched across the field to see if there was any cedars in sight. Didn’t seem to be any cedars in the field or along the edge. Cedars will often grow in ditches or along fences. They will plant theirselves in thickets and in a gully. I was going to have to choose the white pine that was least wrong and make the best of it. I walked around the trees, parting the brush to get a better look. There was one that was almost perfect in its shape, prouder and fuller than the rest. Its flaw was a hollow place near the bottom, where the limbs had been broke or died. I figured I could turn that side to the corner of the living room and the tree would look almost perfect.
It was getting cloudy by the time I sawed the tree down and carried
it to the edge of the pasture. I left the Christmas tree by the fence while I climbed higher to find some holly and other greens. It would be good to have mistletoe, but the only way to get it would be to shoot out a bunch with a shotgun, or climb one of the oak trees on the mountain. I didn’t feel like climbing no oak tree.
Just while I was looking for the Christmas tree, the clouds had moved in and blotted out the sun. The pasture and the valley looked different in the shade, like they had shrunk or got closer. The clouds filled every space in the blue sky. It felt colder all of a sudden. I pulled my coat tighter around me and started climbing.
What I was looking for was turkey’s paw, what some people call ground pine. It’s a kind of club moss and grows in thickets, and on the north sides in damp shady places. It grows along a vine that runs under leaves and litter and lifts up yellow green leaves that look like turkey’s feet. It’s the perfect decoration for hanging along mantels and over doorways. It can be wound around porch posts and along the railings of stairways.