Spencer's Mountain (6 page)

“Yes sir,” replied the boy.

“You'll sit up in that house one day with all your babies playen around you and you can tell 'em you helped build it. You can tell 'em you helped lay the foundation, and helped nail every two-by-four together. You tell 'em that and it'll be a thing to be proud of and glory in. Along with that you'll see the sweat and the work and the know-how that goes into a house, and what makes a house strong, one that won't fall down in a million years. You'll tell that to your babies, son, and they'll feel proud and safe because they'll know the house they live in is good and solid.”

“Aw, Daddy, I haven't even got a girl yet,” the boy said sheepishly.

“You'll be getten one,” said Clay. “Let's go home to supper.”

They picked up Chance at Percy Benson's farm and the man and the boy and the cow plodded home together. It would be hard to say which of them was the most tired.

By some magic Olivia always had supper ready when Clay arrived home. The table was set, the children and the two grandparents were already assembled at the table when Clay and Clay-Boy walked in the door.

“Y'all get washed up and come on to supper,” said the old grandmother. “Livy's fixed up a meal here that's too good for poor folks.”

That they were poor had never really occurred to any of the Spencers. They were familiar with the absence of money, but this was the common condition of all the people in the village, so they were not only ignorant of their condition but even managed to be happy in it.

This very lack of material things created often a curious paradox. Once in a while they could not afford such luxury items as toothpaste, yet they fed on quail, pheasant, wild
turkey and duck and venison. Once Clay had brought home a possum, the trophy of a night's wild scramble through gullies and pine forest, over creeks and swampland after the hounds. Protesting, Olivia had cooked the thing, but everyone agreed the meat was fatty, too gamy and disagreeable. From the summer garden Clay brought home sweet young ears of corn, great beefsteak tomatoes, mealy butterbeans, snap beans, peas, squash. All summer long, at least once a week Olivia spent a day canning vegetables from the garden, blackberries, dewberries and wild strawberries the children would pick by the gallon. If the frost came early and killed the tomato plants she would gather bushels of green tomatoes and fill the kitchen with the vinegary aroma of green-tomato relish.

“Don't tell me nothen about bein' poor,” said Clay, sitting down to the supper table. “When I was a little old shirttail boy we used to go sometimes all week long on nothen but what we could shoot or steal.”

“Oh now you heish tellen them children that, Clay,” protested the old grandmother. “You know I never taught one of you children to steal, and your daddy would have thrashed you within an inch of your life if he ever caught you doen such a thing.”

The old grandfather was too busy eating his pork chop to comment, but he knew the story Clay was leading up to and he gave his son a wink.

“Yes sir,” Clay continued. “We used to be hungry half the time. I remember one winter we was so poor we didn't have nothen to eat but a slice of bacon. Mama was good at maken out, though. I'll hand that to her. She sure made that piece of bacon last a long time. What she done was tie a string to it and let each one of us chew on it for a while. If one of us swallowed it she'd pull it back and hand it to the next one.”

“Aw, Daddy!” the children cried, half-believing him.

“Don't you pay no 'tention to that crazy man,” the old grandmother cried. “He's maken them stories up.”

“Mama,” Clay teased. “You're just sayen that because you're so old you've forgot what it was like.”

“I never forgot a thing in my life,” the old woman insisted, “I fed you children good and didn't have to know no science or biography or any of them courses they teach up there at the school these days. I knew what to give my family and don't you tell me any different.”

“Sorghum molasses and black-eyed peas,” Clay commented. “That's what we got most of the time.”

“That's a fact,” the old woman agreed. “I fed you plenty of black-strap molasses, but I never to this day found anything half as good-tasten and half as good for you. The world would be a heap healthier place if everybody would eat more black-strap molasses.”

When Clay had finished his supper he leaned back in his chair and said, “Man, oh man, them was prime pork chops.”

“Have another one, Clay,” urged Olivia. “There's plenty.”

“Can't do it, woman,” he said. “Thanks all the same. A meal like that always puts me in mind of that natural-born homen pig I run up against one time. I ever tell you babies that story?”

“No Daddy, you never did,” a chorus of voices answered. It was one of their favorite stories and he never tired of telling it.

“Aw, I think I told y'all that story,” he said, remembering the exact moment and time of the last telling.

“I don't remember the way you told it,” Clay-Boy said. “Please tell it again.”

“Well,” Clay began, “it happened the year I was eleven years old and bought me a bicycle. Earned the money setten out tobacco plants for Old Man Godsey, lived over yonder in the Glades. Pap had come down with that trouble he had and took to bed and everybody pitched in to help Mama bring us kids up.

“One day word come from Mama's brother Uncle Benny Tucker, lived over yonder in Buckingham County, for her to send one of us boys over there and pick up a shoat-pig he wanted to give us.

“Mama wanted that shoat powerful bad and me and
Brother Anse wanted a trip to Buckingham County just as bad so nothen would do but we take off one day about four in the mornen to go after that pig.

“Buckingham County is a long sight of a way from here, but Anse and me made it on that bicycle by about the middle of the day. Found Uncle Benny Tucker plowen his winter wheat, but he knew us boys was anxious to start back home again so he come in out of the field and took us down to the pigpen and said, ‘Y'all boys go out in the pen there and pick out a nice-sized shoat. Don't catch one so big you can't lug him home on that bicycle,' Uncle Benny said. So me and Anse got out there in the pen and wasn't long before we had us a nice-sized shoat. Uncle Benny said come on by the house and have dinner with them, but Anse and me wanted to get back home before fall of night so we said we'd better start on home.

“Well, I was bigger than Anse so I did all the footwork on that bicycle, but Anse didn't have it no easier than I did 'cause he had to sit on the handlebars and hold that pig at the same time, and if you haven't ever tried to do a thing like that it's kind of hard to get it in your mind. We got him home though and gave him a name which was Jabez. Mama was powerful glad to get the pig and said it was one of the finest she'd ever seen and she was sure she could get him up to three hundred pounds by killen time. Anse and me turned him loose in the pen and we was two tuckered-out boys that night, I'll tell you.

“Well, the next mornen I come to the breakfast table and Mama said, ‘Son, go out yonder and feed that pig and I'll have your breakfast ready time you get back.' I went out to the pen, but I didn't see sign one of Jabez. I figured maybe he was inside the little shed so I poured his slop in the trough and hollered, ‘Soueeeeeeee! Souoo Pig,' but no Mr. Pig. Finally I got tired of foolen around with him so I didn't do nothen but jump over in the pen and looked in the shed where I figured he was sleepen. He was gone. I looked around a little more and then I found out what happened. There was a hole underneath the fence, just big enough for Jabez to slip through—and that's what he'd done. Well, we
looked for that pig for a week without finden so much as a pound of lard.

“One day about a week later, who should turn up at the house but Uncle Benny Tucker and what was he carryen in a bag but Old Jabez! Don't ask me how Jabez did it, but he'd found his way forty miles back to Uncle Benny's farm. Uncle Benny gave him to us again, and I fixed that pen air tight. Couldn't hardly a mosquito squeeze out of that pen once I finished with it, but I'll tell you somethen hard to believe. Next mornen when I went out to slop Jabez, he was gone again. This time we didn't bother to look for him. I got on my bicycle and went on over to Uncle Benny's. I told him what'd happened and we went down to the pig pen. Jabez wasn't there. We started back for the house and hadn't got more than halfway across the field when I spotted somethen comen towards us lickety-split. He was muddy and briar-scratched and lean as sin, but that was one happy pig.

“Uncle Benny didn't have the heart to send him off again so he give me one in place of Jabez and we didn't have no trouble with the new one to the day we ground him up for sausage. And Uncle Benny never slaughtered Jabez. He kept him around till he just plain died of old age. I never knew to this day whether that shoat just plain loved Uncle Benny Tucker or whether he was a natural-born homen pig.”

“Lord-a-Mercy, Clay,” said Olivia, “you and your long-winded stories. Look at Pattie-Cake fast asleep. I've got to get these children to bed.”

Olivia organized her forces to cope with the complicated process of seeing that everybody got his Saturday-night bath and was put to bed.

“Becky, you wash the baby and put him to bed. Shirley, you take care of Pattie-Cake. Matt, you keep the fire goen so there'll be plenty of hot water and Luke, Mark and John will keep the woodbox full.”

“What can I do for you, Livy?” asked the old woman.

“Anything you feel like doen, Grandma,” replied Olivia. “I'd appreciate a helpen hand with the dishes.”

Clay-Boy had no assigned task; it was understood that he would operate as a kind of flying squad to pitch in wherever
trouble developed, to prod the boys along with their bringing in the firewood, to rescue the baby if he should slip in the bathtub, to help along the assembly line that began at the bathtub and ended with each child in clean pajamas and in bed.

Finally when they were alone Clay and Olivia sat together in the living room to get caught up on what had happened to them while they were away from each other during the day.

“Colonel Coleman stopped by,” said Olivia.

“What did he want?” asked Clay.

Colonel Coleman was the general manager of the stone company, but in spite of the difference in their economic and social levels he and Clay were friends who shared a common interest in hunting and fishing. The Colonel would never buy a hunting dog without asking Clay's advice and seldom went hunting without asking Clay to accompany him.

“He said he had to spend tomorrow in Washington and he wondered if you'd stop by over there and feed his dogs for him sometime duren the day,” answered Olivia.

“You told him I'd do it,” asked Clay.

“I said I was sure you'd be glad to do it for him,” said Olivia. “I thought at first he'd come over to make you another offer for that land on the mountain.”

“He knows I'm never goen to sell that little piece of land,” said Clay. “I took him by there once on a hunt and showed him where I'm putten up the house and he even said he'd try to see to it that no quarries ever got opened up over that way.”

“I reckon he's a good-hearted man after all,” said Olivia.

“The salt of the earth,” said Clay.

After a little while Clay and Olivia too went to their room, and once the lights were out and everyone was in bed, all the people in the house began to call good night to one another. From the girls' room Becky called, “Good night, Luke,” and Luke answered, “Good night Becky, good night Pattie-Cake,” and Pattie-Cake called, “Good night Luke, good night Mama,” and Olivia answered, “Good night, Pattie-Cake, good night, Shirley.” Other voices would join in a
round song of good nights until all thirteen people in the house had said so many good nights that they could not remember who they had said good night to and who they had not and the whole good-night chorus might start all over again unless Clay would finally give the long sleepy yawn which was a signal that everyone had been bidden a proper good night. After that a tentative good night or two might rise from a couple of the younger children and then they would fall silent too.

Clay slept and dreamed of his house. It was a proud thing to have a house a man had built with his own hands, a place to call his own. He saw it in his mind, white and shining in the sunlight, Olivia planting petunias along the front walk and the children playing about her in the grass.

Outside, the night was filled with sound. The high mechanical screech of the cicadas was a metallic din which gradually whined into silence. A turtle dove called. His mate answered, far off, and then her voice sounded again and his voice cried out, closer now. In the distance, flowing over the pine trees, from the swamp, over the pond, came the thousand-voice choir of frogs. Once only came the saddest sound in the world, the single unanswered voice of a whippoorwill, but there was no one to hear it. Everyone in the house was asleep.

The whole week went by without Clay's being able to do any work on the house on the mountain. Three nights he worked late at the mill, and while he regretted the time lost on building his house he welcomed the extra money he got from working overtime for the company. One night there had been rain and the other night he might have worked on the house he had spent helping his father-in-law, Homer Italiano, saw stovewood.

At breakfast that Saturday morning, Clay-Boy asked, “You goen to need me to work on the house today, Daddy?”

“You got somethen you got to do?” asked Clay.

“I got exams comen up,” said Clay-Boy. “I thought maybe I'd do some studyen if you didn't need me.”

“You had better study then,” said Clay. His mind was on a pile of fieldstone he had noticed at the foot of the mountain, and he was eager to collect it with the idea that one day they might become the fireplace and chimney of the house.