It was the first week in November when I went back across the river, on a scawmy morning when fog covered the fields like the earth itself was smoldering. I carried a shovel and burlap cabbage sack. Out hunting sang, I’d say, if I happened on anyone, though that was ever so doubtful on such a dismal morning.
Sam was nothing but bones and patches of hair moldering into the ground. I shoveled out a hole to bury what was left of him and the ground was boggy enough to make it easy work. I wanted to believe there was something more of him somewhere. I knew the Bible claimed no soul for a animal but I wanted to believe part of Sam somehow lived on. If it wasn’t a soul like a man’s maybe it was some kind of happy lingering of what it had felt to rest easy in the barn after a hard day dragging a plow.
Then I climbed the white oak. Holland had a tuft of hair on his head but the rest of him was nothing more than bones held together by barbed wire and rope. I loosed the wire and rope and let him fall. A foot and arm broke free and the head scattered off under a poplar sapling.
After I shimmied down I used the shovel to snap Holland’s backbone in two. I broke off his legs and the other arm and poked out the cabbage sack with his bones. I picked up the head last. That’s when I saw the dog tags laying on the ground. Seeing the dog tags was a bothersome thing, though I couldn’t say the exact why of that.
I walked a good quarter mile deeper into the woods, up the east face of Licklog. I found a big white ash and let that be the spot. Since the ground wasn’t froze, getting Holland buried was no hard chore. I dug a hole a good three feet and laid the sack in the bottom. I shoveled the dirt back in, then scuttled leaves over where I’d dug and stepped off a ways. You couldn’t tell the ground had ever been bothered.
‘You got away with it,’ Sheriff Alexander had said that last afternoon he came, and in some ways it had all been unsettling easy. A part of me troubled over that, because I knew there was a price to be paid some way or another. Even if the state of South Carolina didn’t collect that price, sooner or later God would. That thief on the cross was forgiven but he still had to hang there and hurt. I recollected how Mark warned about the sins of the father being laid on the child. The closer to the baby coming, the more that verse troubled my mind.
Maybe it was traipsing out in the woods on such a drizzly morning but the next day I felt out of sorts. I figured it for a cold and reckoned it would pass in a couple days. But it didn’t pass. By December I could hardly raise out of bed.
When the baby came, I tried to be of some good but it drooped me to do the least little thing. But sick as I was, I was ever so eased to see the baby wasn’t afflicted. They wouldn’t let me hold him, which was the right thing with me ailing, but I did get to see him the day he got born. He lay there all asleep and peaceful looking, his little body scrunched up next to Amy. I studied his features careful. What sprigs of hair he had was blonde and fine as corn silk. That and the shaping of his nose and mouth made there no mistaking Amy was his momma.
By February I was no more able to raise out of bed than years back when I’d had the polio. Fever was thick upon me now. I didn’t get up but to go to the outhouse and that was like walking up Whiteside Mountain. The world got all blurry and dim and I hardly knew it for day or night. All I knew certain was someone else was in that back room with me.
He leaned out of corner shadows with his dark eyes watching me with never a blink. A strand of barbed wire tore into his brow. The blood from the barbs streamed down his face like tears.
‘What do you want of me?’ I shouted at him, but he didn’t answer.
When Amy came in to lay a fresh poultice on my brow I’d point to him in the corner. Soon as I did he melted into the shadows like black ice.
‘There ain’t nothing there, Billy,’ Amy said, but when she left he took shape in the corner again. Just standing there, waiting.
It was the tea that finally did me some good. By then I was so on the down-go I couldn’t hold the cup. Amy reached it to my lips and I sipped slightly as a hummingbird.
‘You got to swallow it all, Billy,’ Amy said, keeping that cup pressed to my lips.
Day and night for three days, every time I opened my eyes Amy had more tea for me to sip. I could feel it spreading through me, doing its work to cool my fever. Soon enough I held the cup in my hand.
The fever broke the third evening. I sat up in bed and ate something besides soup for the first time in a far while.
‘You look something of your old self,’ Amy said, taking my empty plate.
‘I feel mostly alive,’ I said. ‘That’s a come-up from where I been.’
Come early morning I had to go to the outhouse. I slipped my coat over my long handles and put on my brogans. I lit the lantern and stepped outside.
A hard frost crunched under my feet. Stars speckled the sky and a wet moon snagged on the white oak’s top branch. Somewhere down near the river a horned owl hooted but the rest of the night was quiet. The bullfrogs was gabbed down in river mud, the cicadas froze dead by frost.
When I’d done my business, I had a thought to check the mule I’d bought in the fall but went back to the house instead. I was still puny, like something had sapped the very marrow from my bones, but my mind and the world was clear again. I knew in a few days I’d have my strength gained up.
Amy hadn’t brung the baby to the back room when she’d tended me so it had been a good month since I’d laid eyes on him. I stood by the hearth and held the lamp over the crib, looking as I always had to see Amy in his features. He slept on his back, a quilt pulled up to his shoulders, little fists no bigger than walnuts tucked under his chin like he was praying.
‘Isaac,’ I said softly, getting used to the name. I touched his head with my fingers, what hair there was fine and yellow as corn silk. His eyelashes flickered and Holland Winchester’s dark eyes stared straight into mine.
I knew then my certain future. It was like those eyes was God’s hands opening palm up to show me the way it would ever be. I knew then the truth of that verse about Him seeing the fall of the sparrow. I knew He witnessed the quietest stir of a leaf, the smallest bead of water. I saw the coming years when those eyes would look at me from across the table every meal I ate, would be waiting for me every afternoon when I came from my field. I saw me and him later on working together, putting up hay, planting the fields, and all of a sudden his eyes on me and how it would feel like a icy fishhook stuck barb-deep in my heart and I’d wonder if somehow Holland was watching me from the other side.
The easy thing to do would have been to walk the four miles to the highway. Some farmer taking eggs or milk to Seneca would get me the rest of the way. If nobody was at the jailhouse I’d set down with my back against the door till Sheriff Alexander or Bobby Murphree showed up.
But I couldn’t do that. No matter what Amy said that young one was Holland’s too. The only way to do right by Holland was give his child shoes and a full belly and teach him how to be a man. To do those things I’d have to stay on this farm and love him for what he was—a son.
I hadn’t got away with nothing.
I
was four years old when I first knew she was watching me. Momma had given me a puzzle to put together, so I’d laid the bright green and red pieces out on the pew while Preacher Robertson shouted about things I didn’t understand. I couldn’t make the puzzle pieces fit together. I’d soon given up and started fidgeting and looking all around like a kid will do in church.
I’d looked across the center aisle to the row opposite of us where Mrs. Winchester sat. Our eyes met. At that moment I realized those dark-brown eyes had watched me a long time—not just seconds or minutes but months, maybe years, and not just here in church but from across the barbed wire fence that separated her farm from ours.
Her eyes locked on mine, like there wasn’t anybody else in that church but me and her. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d have wanted too. Those eyes held me firm as any arms could. They were hungry eyes.
She fumbled in her pocketbook and took out a peppermint. ‘After church,’ she said, but silently, mouthing the words.
When the last amen was said I made a beeline through the tall legs of the grown-ups to where she waited. She unwrapped the candy, and her bony fingers laid the peppermint on my tongue.
‘There now, sonny,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you one of them every Sunday.’
I felt Momma’s hand on my shoulder, her grip firm as her voice.
‘Come on, Isaac,’ she said, and she pulled me away from Mrs. Winchester.
‘I don’t want you taking candy or anything else from that old woman,’ Momma said in the truck. ‘I don’t want you around her.’
‘Yes ma’am,’ I said.
But I lied.
Whenever I thought Momma and Daddy wouldn’t notice, I sneaked away before or after church and found her. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, played not with other children but with grown-ups. As soon as Mrs. Winchester saw me coming she opened her ragged black pocketbook and took out a peppermint. There was hardly a word between us, like we were spies trading secrets.
After a while it wasn’t just church. Sometimes when I was playing she’d show up at the fence, always when Momma was inside and Daddy in the fields.
‘Here,’ she said, reaching through the rusty barbed wire. ‘You enjoy that sugar tit.’
By the time I was eight I was sneaking over to her house. On days breath bloomed from my mouth in white puffs and frost or snow crunched under my feet, she poured me cups of hot chocolate. If it was hot she gave me Cheerwine or Coca-Cola in ice-cold bottles that made it taste all the better.
‘How are you doing in your school-learning?’ she might ask as we sat at the kitchen table, or‘It looks like we’ll have rain by evening.’
But it always seemed she was about to say something else. She’d purse her lips as if to speak, then seem to think better of it.
It was a dark house she lived in, the shades always drawn, the lights never on. There were rifles racked on the walls. Rods and reels cluttered a corner near the door, a pair of men’s boots on the floor beside them. In the kitchen a calendar yellowed above the stove, its edges curled. The month on the calendar was August, the year 1952.
Outside in the driveway was a blue pickup, at least it had once been blue. Rust had scabbed it brown but for a few flecks of paint. The tires sagged and rotted, making the truck look like it had sunk into the ground.
Such things would have been spooky to a lot of kids, especially with a snaggly-toothed old woman living alone in such a place. But I always felt cozy and comfortable there, not the least bit afraid.
Sometimes if it was cold we sat by the fire, the cup of hot chocolate cradled in my hands. On the mantle above me loomed a clock, its hands frozen at five minutes until eleven. Beside the clock was a photograph, framed and hung like a painting.
‘Who is he?’ I once asked.
‘That’s my youngest boy,’ she said. ‘You favor him, especially in the eyes.’
I looked up at the man in the uniform. I studied his eyes and saw they were dark like mine, like hers.
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know,’ she told me. ‘But I have a hope of someday finding out.’
‘So he’s alive.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He ain’t alive.’
I didn’t understand that, but there are lots of things grown-ups say when you’re a kid you can’t figure out.
She took the cup from my hands.
‘You best be getting on home. Your folks will be missing you.’
That was what she always said, instead of‘Don’t tell you’ve been over here,’ but she and I both knew that was what meant.
I knew Momma and Daddy didn’t like her, had felt them tense up whenever she was nearby. I’d never known them to speak a word to her, though she was our only close neighbor. They acted like Mrs. Winchester didn’t even exist, like she was something dreamed up by a child’s imagination.
A year passed before Momma caught on to what I was doing. One afternoon on the way home I found Momma waiting at the edge of the woods.
‘Don’t you never go see that old woman again,’ Momma hissed, like she was afraid Mrs. Winchester might hear.
Momma slipped through a gap in the barbed wire and pulled me behind her. I’d gotten my sleeve caught on the fence, but she didn’t stop pulling, even when the cloth caught and made a tearing sound. You’d have thought there was a bull charging us.
After that Momma watched me like a hawk at home and at church. But by the next spring there was little reason to, because Mrs. Winchester’s health had gotten bad. A mild stroke, Preacher Robertson called it, but it was enough to keep her from getting to church or out and about her yard.
So years passed, and I spoke not another word to Mrs. Winchester. Afternoons when the school bus went by her house I’d catch glimpses of her on the porch. I’d look out the window and see her staring toward the bus, toward me. I knew she searched through the glass for my face among all the others. And I somehow knew something else—that old and sick as she was she wouldn’t die until I’d seen her again.
So when Sheriff Alexander came that Saturday and told me what he wanted, a part of me was surprised only that Mrs. Winchester had waited this long.
When I’d first glanced up and seen him coming down the field edge toward me, it might have been Daddy but for his uniform and hat. He moved slow like Daddy, with one leg stiff and dragging behind the other.
I wished it was Daddy. Field work had always seemed easier when we’d done it together. We could talk about school or baseball or how the crops were doing, and that would help pass the time.
Sheriff Alexander was a big man. You could see that even at a distance, tall and pussel-gutted, older than Daddy too. I looked up towards the house and saw the silver patrol car parked in the driveway. This ain’t any good news coming my way, I thought.
‘Isaac, isn’t it?’ Sheriff Alexander asked.
‘Yes sir,’ I said, still on my knees.
Only when he spoke did I lay the butcher knife beside my sack. I didn’t want to stop. I’d been cutting cabbage since dawn and I was wore out. I knew once I stopped it would be hard to get myself going again.