Being nice was something Mary Bet thought she could be very good at, yet she did not always feel nice. Her brother, who was between Myrt and O’Nora in age, had a way of aggravating her without his trying. Siler was different from anybody in her family living or dead, and not just because he was deaf. He was alert and sensitive to everything around him to such a degree that if anything was amiss, he was the first to know of it. If Myrt and O’Nora had been arguing with each other privately, he would know right away, and he would sulk off by himself until they had made up and come and found him, holding hands to show that they were no longer fighting. He was relentless until the things of his world were back in their proper place. “It’s his way of keeping himself from grief,” Cicero explained. Myrtle Emma liked that Siler would put his hand on the side of the piano and watch her, and she thought that he might’ve been a great musician. It seemed tragic to her, watching him trying to understand something that was in the air all around, yet as hidden and mysterious as signals running through telegraph wires, or the voices of ghosts who were not yet angels.
There were things that Siler seemed not to understand. Words that had more than one meaning were particularly hard for him to grasp, so Mary Bet would talk to him in the most basic way she could. You couldn’t say “make haste,” because there was nothing to make; you just said “hurry.” It was silly to pick a crow with Siler—he would only laugh. Yet he knew distances “as the crow flies,” and was delighted when some expression like that made sense.
It irritated her that he knew more about her and her secrets than did her sisters. He could tell when someone was coming up the stairs; he knew by feel who it was. And he knew about the crow. When she was out in the chicken yard once gathering eggs in a basket and he was pouring water into the trough, he gave her a stern,
meaningful look. He was like a watchful spirit; he seemed to know everything about everybody. And he told her one time that Netty was not real, not even a ghost, and that she should stop talking to her. “Who do you mean?” she asked. Not bothering to use his hands, he said, “Yah Nadda.” Then he mimed patting a little girl on the head, exactly as Mary Bet had done earlier in the day. When his back was turned she said, “You’re stupid.”
She felt bad, so she went off to find a place where he could never follow her; she walked up to the First Baptist Church and around back to the cemetery where the new graves belonged to people other than her family. It was cool on the grass at the edge of the little graveyard under the shade trees, and she thought it was all right to sit there in her skirt on a warm summer day. One newly cut stone was that of a four-year-old boy, who had died from pneumonia—she’d heard her sisters talking about him. She said a prayer for him, ending with, “If you’re in heaven, see if Annie’s all right.” She made a cross in the air with her joined palms, a ritual she’d invented after her mother died. When she wanted the prayer to have special weight—if someone was sick, or late coming home—she washed her hands before praying. She would also touch her fingertips to her chin three times while praying and whisper the words.
“You stay here, Netty,” she whispered, as though still praying. When she opened her eyes, she looked around and realized that her friend was gone. But she knew that she could find her here if she ever needed to.
Later in the summer, Siler was afflicted with glossalalia. It happened in the middle of a tent revival out at Calvin Grove. He stood up when the preacher asked if there were any souls ready to be washed in the spirit. It was as though he’d actually heard the preacher speak. He raised his hands in the air, and began talking in words that came from much farther back in his throat than ever before. The words seemed to issue from down in his belly, from deep
in the earth, and he a faucet of indecipherable language that had not been heard since man first named the beasts of the field. It lasted less than a minute—a period of time that felt stretched into the edges of the day—and left on his face an expression of joy and satisfaction.
That evening Siler told his father that he thought he might like to go spend a year at the institution in Morganton after all. He could make friends and get a job as a carpenter and maybe even learn to minister in some way to the deaf. He’d had tutors over the years, and spent weeks at a time in Raleigh, but he’d always grown too homesick to stay for very long. His parents had relented and let him come home. “I believe our boy is growing up,” Cicero announced to his family at supper, Siler grinning self-consciously. He patted his little sister’s shoulders, and Mary Bet felt a warmth spreading through her body. Siler was never affectionate with her, had never hugged or kissed her that she could remember, and now he suddenly seemed different.
THE CENTURY WAS
on the point of turning, Mary Bet not yet twelve years old, when O’Nora fell off her horse jumping a stone fence.
By this time Haw County had shaken off its postwar depression and was shambling toward a modern agrarian future, with Hartsoe City as its boomtown. The Silers and Murchisons and other pioneers were no longer the most prominent families. Newcomers seeing opportunity in the forest and the railroad bought up acreage and built mills to turn trees into lumber, sometimes without even moving from Richmond and Raleigh and wherever else they lived. The village had become a town with a handful of little stores, a tobacco warehouse, two saw and planing mills, an agricultural machinery plant that also made window sashes and blinds, three boardinghouses, and some thirty-five houses clustered around the old Murchison place. There was a farmers’ alliance and a weekly
newspaper that advocated for farmers’ rights over those of businessmen. A black entrepreneur named J. T. McAdo opened a barbershop, and then a photographic studio and a jewelry store. And still more things were coming—there was talk of a furniture company and a telephone line to connect Hartsoe City to Williamsboro. Out in the county, the cotton mill up on the Haw River in London was the biggest cash concern.
For all the changes, though, Haw was rural to its dirt-road, pine-strewn, silage-scented core. A couple of thousand farms large and small—and nearly that many tenant farmers—raised crops and livestock. And the new things, when you stumbled upon them, took you by surprise.
Old Hartsoe’s gristmill had been eclipsed by others—bigger mills with better equipment, some of them running two stone sets at a time. Now an old man, Hartsoe still had a ferocious energy, which he channeled into an obsession that had been steadily consuming him for the past several years—the creation of a perpetual-motion machine. O’Nora was on her way to see her grandfather, his mill an hour south of town. She had talked Mary Bet into coming with her, riding behind her in the saddle, on the promise that they wouldn’t go faster than a trot. There were three things that Mary Bet feared most, and they were germs, horses, and her grandfather Samuel. He had a stern, unyielding way with children—what little he said was in a nearly incomprehensible German accent that made him seem as distant as the prophets.
O’Nora wanted to do something for her father, and at sixteen she also wanted to prove her independence. She offered to deliver some swamp-root tonic to their grandfather—really in the way of a peace offering from Cicero to his father, after Cicero had neglected to send for his weekly supply of flour and feed. To Samuel this could only mean disloyalty, never mind the fact that there were closer mills for his son to do business with.
So O’Nora loaded her saddlebag with two bottles of tonic and a dozen big yellow onions—the kind her father ate raw for his health, as he had since the war. “Don’t be scared of Grandpa Samuel,” O’Nora told her little sister. “He won’t bite you.”
Mary Bet pictured her grandfather baring his teeth at her, then thought of the big dapple-gray horse doing the same. She stood on the mounting box in the barn and let Siler help her into the saddle behind her sister, and off they went. It was a beautiful May morning, wild jonquils and sweet yellow jasmine blooming along the roadside. After a mile, O’Nora announced that there was a shortcut through the woods that Siler had showed her and she wanted to try it.
“Maybe we should stick with the road,” Mary Bet said. She felt less confident of O’Nora than of Siler and Myrt, and not simply because they were older. O’Nora was apt to try something just for the sake of trying it, and then later find that it was not a good thing to do.
“If it doesn’t work, we’ll come back,” O’Nora said. “It might be easy as pie, so what’s the harm?” At her command, Jackson stepped across the culvert on the left and up the little embankment and into a shadowy copse of trees, the white-flowering hawthorn and red-tinged crab apple as pretty as candy. Soon the woods gave way to a clearing of low weeds and stumps ringed by shreds of morning fog. A bluebird flitted from a hickory stump at their approach. It was quiet. “I don’t remember this,” O’Nora said. “This is new. But the trail must go on into those woods yonder.”
“Don’t you think we should go back?”
“Let’s go a little farther.” The horse continued, picking his way between log skids and plow clods, the torn land unreadable. After several minutes they came to the woods’ edge, but the trail had disappeared. O’Nora slid from the horse, smoothed out her skirt, and began studying the ground in all directions. Before them lay a dappled wood, carpeted with mandrakes, a fairy forest of little green
umbrellas. Mary Bet knew it was no use to argue with her sister. “I maybe took the wrong turning,” O’Nora finally said. “We’ll cut through these woods and find it farther on.”
Mary Bet gave her a hand up and after a while they were through the woods and out to a meadow. O’Nora looked all around.
“Maybe we should go back,” Mary Bet said.
“No, this is right. I remember that tree with the pitchfork-like.” O’Nora clicked her tongue and began posting, pushing Jackson into his fastest trot.
Mary Bet kept quiet so as not to be thought timid. She wrapped her arms so tightly around her sister she felt she must be squeezing the air out. She pressed her cheek into the velvet of O’Nora’s riding jacket and she could hear her heart thumping along with the horse’s hooves. The thickets and deep woods flashed by as they jounced along, now so fast that her bottom no longer hurt—they went bounce, bounce, bounce in the saddle, and the woods moved as they veered left or right, sometimes downhill, then slowing to step through a creek, then back up again. A strand of O’Nora’s hair came loose and flew across Mary Bet’s face so that the green world smelled like her sister’s warm red-brown hair.
Out into a field of switchgrass and meadow grass they went. There were doves calling off somewhere; Mary Bet remembered this distinctly, because she had always thought that doves sang only in the late afternoon, mourning the end of day. They were cantering through a field, the grassy ground moving under them faster and faster as they plunged down through a thicket, and O’Nora said, “Hold on!” as the horse leaped a stone fence. The wind felt sharp in their faces. O’Nora hooted a laugh and made Jackson go even faster, until they were bounding over the ground. O’Nora hated riding sidesaddle because you could never go this fast—she liked bareback best of all because, she said, “you can really feel the horse.” But she only did it when her father was not around.
There was another dip and then a rise and then a sudden dip, and a fence that Mary Bet saw just as they started down. There was something about the gait that seemed wrong—they were going too fast, then they slowed way up as O’Nora tried to veer off to the side. At the last second she went ahead and made Jackson jump. Mary Bet clung to her sister, and she heard hooves strike the top stones as her insides rose and fell. And yet they were still sailing over the fence.
When they landed on the other side, Mary Bet at first wondered why the trees were so high and moving in a circle instead of rushing by. She was still touching her sister, though only with one hand. Then she saw a horse standing a little ways off, shaking and snorting. It looked like Jackson, yet he was riderless. “It’s Jackson,” she said, laughing, as she pulled a little pinecone out of her hair. She realized that her back was sore because she was lying on a pinecone in a soft pile of needles.
The sun angled through the skinny limbs overhead. Beyond them was blue sky. A bobwhite called far off in the woods, and the wind disappeared in Mary Bet’s ears. O’Nora’s ankle crossed Mary Bet’s, and when Mary Bet sat up she saw her sister lying faceup, her arms out as if she were flying. Her head was turned away. Mary Bet crawled around and saw that her sister’s face was still, the eyes closed, the jaw slack. She kissed her forehead. “Wake up, O’Nora,” she said, “please.” Not a whisper of breath came from her sister, nor a ripple of movement, nor was there any sound but the sighing of wind in the trees. It blew a loose lock of hair across O’Nora’s rosy cheek.
Mary Bet began crying. But she angrily wiped the tears off her face and stood up and started calling “Help!” After a while she began walking. She finally came to a road, and after a few minutes an old Negro cart driver came along and went with her back across the fields, his cart bumping slowly lest a wheel break in a burrow. “No use in hurryin’ just to be late,” he said.
It took a lifetime.
All the way home, the man tried to comfort her, telling her of his wife’s many sorrows and saying, “It’s just a cryin’ shame, missy, a sweet girl like that.” Jackson plodded along with the driver’s mule, and all Mary Bet could do was stare at the driver’s bare toes sticking out through his shoes and wonder why one of his big toes had a cracked yellow toenail that angled off his toe while the others looked fine. She wondered if it hurt, and she wondered why Negroes had brown nails. She wished she could have cracked yellow toenails if it would make O’Nora well. And when she thought of O’Nora and glanced back into the cart and saw her curled up between burlap sacks, she prayed that she would wake up by the time they got home.
When they arrived, Mary Bet and the black man were praying aloud together, and she couldn’t remember who had started it. Yet when she saw her house she realized that her own grief was not what frightened her the most nor held her in the most suspense. She thought she could not bear to tell her father.