Nathan Coulter (2 page)

Mother came to the foot of the stairs and called us to breakfast. I shook Brother awake and waited for him to dress, and then we went down to the kitchen.

Our mother was sick, and in the afternoons when she'd washed the dinner dishes she had to lie down to rest. Daddy made Brother and me stay out of the house then so it would be quiet. When the weather was good we'd go to the field with Daddy or Uncle Burley, or go swimming, or just wander around looking for things to do. And even though we worried about our mother's sickness it was good to have the whole afternoon to ourselves without anybody to bother us.

We went down the hill and into the woods that grew along the hollow between our farm and Grandpa's. Just enough air was stirring to tilt the leaves without rustling them together, and except for our feet rattling dry leaves on the ground the woods was quiet. We climbed the fence and started on toward the dry streambed at the bottom of the hollow.

When we'd gone about ten feet on Grandpa's side of the fence we came to Aunt Mary's grave. The grave was a shallow trough in the hillside, filled with sticks and leaves. There was no stone to mark it.

Our Aunt Mary had been buried there a long time ago. It was the first thing anybody remembered about our family, and nobody could remember anything else for a good while after that; we didn't know how many years it had been since she died.

Aunt Mary was our great-great-grandfather's youngest daughter. His name was Jonas Thomasson Coulter. And about the time Aunt Mary was grown he got into an argument with a man named Jeff Ellis who was
living on our place then. Jonas thought the line fence between their farms should be built on Jeff Ellis's side of the hollow, and Jeff Ellis thought it ought to go on Jonas's side. They squabbled over it for several years, and there was some shooting done by both sides before it was settled.

While they were in the worst of this fight Aunt Mary took scarlet fever and died. Jonas Thomasson Coulter went down to the hollow and dug a grave where he thought the fence ought to run, and he made the rest of the family bury her in it. His wife never would speak to him or even look at him after that; but it settled the argument over the fence.

Jeff Ellis was afraid of the dead, and he wouldn't come close to the grave. So they built the fence ten feet on his side of it. That made Jonas's farm ten feet wider than even he thought it should have been.

It didn't really matter much, because the land in that hollow was steep and ill-natured anyway, and nothing ever grew there but trees and buck bushes. But Uncle Burley said that wouldn't have bothered Jonas Thomasson Coulter. What he wanted was to own land; it didn't matter a damn whether it was flat or straight up and down, or whether it would grow tobacco or buck bushes.

That was all we knew about Grandpa's grandfather—his name, and how he'd made certain that Grandpa's line would run where it did. We didn't know where he came from, or even where he was buried.

It wasn't long after they buried Aunt Mary there in the hollow until one of the Ellises saw her ghost. She walked back and forth across her grave on dark nights, carrying a dishpan in one hand and shaking a dish-rag with the other one, the way she'd always looked coming back to the house after she'd emptied the dirty water over the yard fence. From then on a lot of people saw her, our people and different ones of the Ellises. Grandpa said he saw her once when he was a boy. And I thought I'd seen her a time or two, but I wasn't sure enough to tell anybody but Brother.

Her ghost walked because she wanted to be buried in the graveyard with the rest of the dead people in our family. But nobody had ever taken the time to dig her up and bury her there. We never even put flowers on her grave.

The top of the grave was caved in where the dirt had fallen into the hollow places between her bones. I thought her bones had probably rotted too. It would have been hard to dig her up and take her anyplace.
We'd waited too long. A big hickory grew up beside the grave, and she was just some earth tangled in the roots. It was strange to think of Aunt Mary being a part of Grandpa's farm, or maybe a hickory tree.

We climbed out of the hollow and walked along the edge of the big woods on the river bluff, then crossed the point of the ridge and went down again until we came to the hollow where Grandpa's spring was. Old Oscar was standing in the shade of the oak trees below the spring.

Grandpa had raised and trained saddle horses once until he went broke at it. And old Oscar had been his stud. He was a dark chestnut with a narrow white blaze on his face. He'd been beautiful when he was young, and high-spirited. When they were breaking him he kicked Grandpa in the face and left a long, jagged scar across his cheek. But now he was gentle. He was twenty-five years old, and he stayed thin because his teeth were bad. Uncle Burley said he'd finally starve to death because he wouldn't have enough teeth to eat with. He was blind too, and his eyes were as white as milk. It was as if he'd turned his eyes back into his head to look at whatever it was he thought about.

Brother and I spoke to him and walked toward his head. He rattled his breath through his nose and trembled until we let him smell our hands and he recognized us. Brother caught him by a hank of his mane and led him over to the spring wall. I broke a switch off a tree and stripped the leaves; we climbed up on the wall and onto Oscar's back. We guided him with the switch; when we wanted him to go to the right we jiggled the switch against the left side of his face, and against the right side of his face when we wanted him to go to the left.

Daddy and Grandpa always said that Oscar would fall down someday and cripple us. But he hardly ever stumbled. Uncle Burley said Oscar knew his way around the farm as well as he knew the inside of his skin. He had it all in his head. He didn't need to see it. In a way, Oscar walked and grazed and drank in his own mind.

Brother guided him around the spring and along the side of the hill to the Coulter Branch hollow, and then turned down toward the river. Oscar didn't like walking in a strange place, but we spoke to him and encouraged him, and before long he got used to the slant of the hill. He walked slower, though, than he did when he was in the pasture, as if afraid the road might drop out from under him or a tree grow up in his way.

We followed the old wagon road down Coulter Branch to the bottom of the hill and turned upriver past the old Billy Hole landing where Beriah Easterly had his store. The river ran close to the road there. We took the path down through a woods of water maples and elms and sycamores to where Uncle Burley's fishing shack stood overlooking the river.

Once the shack had been painted green, but the paint had weathered to a color that was as much blue as green. The trees grew up close around it, and vines had grown over the walls and out along the eaves.

We got off old Oscar at the camp house and walked the rest of the way to the river. He stood still where we'd stopped him, as if he'd run against a wall and didn't know how to get around it.

We walked upstream along the top of the riverbank. Behind us the trees closed around the camp house and Oscar; and then we went into a patch of horseweeds and out of sight. The horseweeds grew high over our heads, and so thick we had to bend them out of our way.

“This is a jungle,” Brother said. “Nobody ever was here before.”

All we could see was horseweeds. We had to look straight up to see the sky. But we knew where we were, and we went on, turning the bend of the river.

Brother stopped and broke off two dead weed stalks and handed one of them to me. “Here's a gun,” he said.

“We'll kill a lion,” I told him.

Before long we crossed a gully filled with tin cans and bottles, and followed a path into the open place that Jig Pendleton had cleared on the bank above his shanty boat. From there we could look down into the bend and see Uncle Burley's camp. Oscar stood there with his head turned toward the river.

In the middle of the open place was a table where Jig cleaned his fish. Above the table an old set of grocery scales hung from a tree limb. A few worn-out nets were strewn around on the ground, and one of Jig's trot-lines was stretched between two trees to dry.

The path went to the edge of the bank, and then stair-stepped to the water. We went down the steps and crossed the plank to the shanty boat.

Jig Pendleton lived there alone and fished for a living. He was crazy on religion, and when he wasn't busy fishing he'd fasten himself in the shanty
and read the Bible from cover to cover over and over again. He worried all the time about the sins of the flesh, and believed that if he could purify himself the Lord would send down a chariot of fire and take him to Heaven. But he never could quite purify himself enough. Sooner or later he always gave it up and got on a drunk, and then he'd have to start all over again.

He'd invited Uncle Burley and Brother and me in to see him several times, and the inside of his shanty was a sight. He'd found an old Singer sewing machine, and thrown the sewing part of it away, and fastened the iron frame with the wheel and treadle to the floor. Then he'd wired a lot of spools to the walls and run strings between them, zigzagging and crisscrossing from one end of the shanty to the other. This contraption of strings and pulleys was hooked to the wheel and treadle. It worked like a charm, but Jig never had been able to decide what it was for. He just kept adding spools and string until it was more complicated than a spider web. The whole inside of his house was a machine that couldn't do anything but run. When he was drinking Jig would sit and treadle the machine and sing and shout and pray for the Lord to purify him. One night when he came home drunk he got tangled up in it and nearly choked to death before Gander Loyd came along and found him the next morning. Some of the missionary society women in town saved string and spools to give to him because they felt sorry for him. He had a wife and daughter living somewhere, but they hadn't had anything to do with him since he'd got so crazy.

A couple of times Jig had taken his boat out of the river and left the country. He stayed away a year both times, and nobody knew much about where he went or what he did. Once he told Uncle Burley that he just wandered around, looking at the mountains and rivers and oceans that the Lord had made. Since the Lord had gone to all the trouble of making them, he thought the least a man could do was go and look at them. He was as crazy as a June bug, but he was a good fisherman and didn't bother anybody, and he was Uncle Burley's friend.

Jig was busy loading bait and tackle into his rowboat, and we sat down to watch him.

“Hello, Jig,” Brother said.

“Hello there, Tom and Nathan,” Jig said. “How're you little children?”

“Fine,” I said.

“We hunted for a lion up there in the horseweeds,” Brother said, “but we couldn't find one.”

“The lion and the lamb shall lie down together,” Jig said, “and a little child shall lead them.”

“You wouldn't lead the lion that lives in that horseweed patch,” Brother said. “He'd bite your durned arm off.”

“You oughtn't to cuss,” Jig said. “It makes Jesus sad.”

Brother was ashamed of himself then, and he hushed. Jig began to bail out the rowboat.

“What're you fixing to do?” I asked him.

“Fixing to run my lines,” Jig said.

“We'll go with you,” Brother said.

Jig shook his head. “No, honey. You might drown. It's awful easy to drown in this river.”

“We can swim,” Brother said. “We won't drown.”

“Listen,” Jig said. “If the Lord's planning for one of you all to drown, that's His business. But He don't want me to get messed up in it.”

He untied the boat and began rowing up the river. Brother and I went back to the bank.

“Let's go swimming,” Brother said.

He started upstream again toward the sandbar, and I went with him, feeling a little guilty as if Jig might tell the Lord on us. But when we got to the sandbar Brother began to take his clothes off, running to the water; and I ran too, trying to beat him.

I kicked my clothes off and ran out into the river, letting the weight of it against my legs trip me under. I felt the water slap over my head, and I swam down the slope of the rock bottom until the deep cold made my ears ache. I rolled over and looked up into the blackness. The current carried me along. I loosened myself in it, and held still in the movement of the water. I couldn't tell whether my head was up or down; I felt as if I could swim forever in any direction. My lungs tightened, wanting to breathe, and I kicked the bottom away from me and swam up until I saw a patch of light floating on the surface. I broke through it into the air again.

I shook the water out of my eyes and floated. The sky seemed a deeper
blue after my eyes had been in the dark. Over my head a white cloud unraveled in the wind. The sky widened to the tops of the hills that circled around the valley. Inside the ring of hilltops trees grew along both banks of the river. They leaned toward me—willow and maple and sycamore.