The Tilted World (9 page)

“Howdy,” he said, looking her over. “I’m Jesse Swan Holliver, and I’ve taken over the trading from Cody Morrison, and I’m here to see to your skins.” He cinched his reins and swung off the bench. He wore a fine beaver hat and a red kerchief at his neck. His hair was black and curly, which she saw when he tilted the hat toward her.

Dixie Clay said nothing, and he lifted his gaze from her face to the house. “Your people home?”

“No,” she said. “But I’ll fetch the skins. Got a mess of ’em.”

“Well, that’s good to hear, seeing as how I had to fight to reach you. Those roads from Kirby are washed out. My axles were dragging.”

She turned toward the house and he strolled alongside her. “Wagon got stuck on Reynders Road. Had to throw down some pine knots to pull out and not fifty feet later move a big tree; took me an hour.”

They climbed onto the gallery and Dixie Clay invited him to sit on the rocker as she’d seen her father do with the fur trader. She went inside to fetch him a glass of buttermilk and made a second trip to carry the bundle of skins, which she set on the floor and inventoried as she cut the strings. “Three coons, three otter, three mink, two skunk, one pelt nearly black entire—”

This was a particularly fine fur, and she flicked her eyes up at the trader’s face to see if it showed interest, which it did—“one white possum, a civet cat—”

“A civet cat?”

“He was borrowing my eggs, and I got tired of lending ’em.”

He hooted.

She continued, “One civet cat, three deer, and, oh yes, one large panther.”

She rocked back on her heels and watched as he graded the skins, turning them over. “Who shot ’em?” Jesse asked.

“I did.”

“Who skint ’em?”

“I did.”

“And you stretched ’em, too?”

“I shot ’em, skint ’em, stretched ’em, scraped ’em, cased ’em, and I’m selling ’em. Ten dollars for the bundle.”

At this the man laughed, and his laugh was boyish. She thought of the root beer float at the lunch counter at Wiggins’, the ticklefizz in her nose. Maybe he was younger than she’d guessed, seventeen or eighteen.

“Can’t see my way clear to paying more than five.” He fingered the panther pelt, well shaped and soft.

“The skunk alone is worth a dollar.”

“This old black skin?” He dangled it between his fingers. “Ain’t hardly got any white on it at all.”

“And that’s precisely why they want it in New York City.” She felt his eyes flick to her face, but she continued smoothing the skins. “Yup, Papa decided not to wait on Morrison this year. Said prices traders pay around these parts weren’t hardly worth checking his traps for.” She began stacking the skins, all business now. “Said this year we’re sending them straight up to Fogarty Brothers of New York City.” She squeezed the skins to roll them into a bundle.

Jesse looked at her shrewdly. “Your papa wouldn’t go to all that trouble.”

“Would too. These skins were wrapped in burlap, all ready to be toted to the post office, before I opened them for you.” Dixie Clay wondered if she could support this, but couldn’t think of a single piece of burlap in the house. She squeezed the bundle together with one hand and slid the twine beneath it. “Now press your finger, please, sir, so I can tie a knot.”

“I’ll save you the trip to town. Give you six dollars.”

“I fancy a trip to town. Make it ten.”

“Seven.”

“Ten. Fogarty Brothers’re keen on otter right now. Say they’re drowning in orders for otter-trimmed opera cloaks with three-quarter bell sleeves and ivory buttons.” This came straight from the Sears catalog. When she’d seen that cloak, she’d thought of her mother but didn’t know why: she’d never been to an opera, nor worn a cloak for that matter.

Dixie Clay was still cinching the bundle, waiting for his finger so she could knot the twine. But instead he rocked back with a smile and took off his hat and laid it on his knee. Dixie Clay sat on her heels, figuring out what was so funny about his eyes. One was blue, the other green. She wasn’t sure which one to look at, both so marble-pretty, and almost like you could choose between two people to talk to. Like a baby doll of Patsy McMorrow’s that had a smiling face in the front, and, if you twisted its head around, a crying face on the other side.

Jesse set his hat back on his black curls. She was sad to see them go. He took a long pull of buttermilk, and she had the urge to offer him something more. With her father and brother gone, she hadn’t been fixing meals. But if it was a month later, she’d have rhubarb, could offer him a piece of pie.

He leaned forward then, elbows on his knees. “What’s your name?”

“Dixie Clay.”

“Dixie Clay. And how old are you, Dixie Clay?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen. Well, well, well. Miss Dixie Clay, thirteen years old, how about that.” He bent down and at last placed his finger on the twine she was still pulling tight. “I suppose I’ve been outfoxed. And I’m not even sure I mind. Ten dollars it is.”

She tied the knot, feeling how close his face was to hers.

“I’ve traded in five states, Miss Dixie Clay, and if I had a nickel for every time I’d run up on a gal as pretty as you—”

She felt her cheeks warm and worried he’d feel the heat.

Then he stood, lifting the skins. “—I’d have a nickel,” he finished.

She stood too and he stuck out his hand to shake. A business deal, she thought, and held out her hand, but he didn’t shake it, just stood holding it, and holding it some more. She wasn’t sure what to do with her eyes so she trained them on her hand in his, which was white and clean.

“Tell your father,” Jesse said at last, “he raised a heck of a deal maker. And a heck of a hunter.”

When she looked up, he tilted his head—a flash of green eye beneath hat brim—and then he released her fingers suddenly and turned to walk down the steps.

She followed him to his wagon, where Jesse overhanded the bundle of skins into the bed. With a key he opened the lockbox under the seat and removed ten dollar coins. She’d almost forgotten about the money, somehow. The coins felt cool in her palm where his had been.

Jesse found his seat and his reins. “Give Fogarty Brothers my regards,” he said, and winked. Then with a “Git!” he turned the team and set off at a quick trot, the chains singing, a music she listened to until there was no more of it to hear.

The next year he’d come in the same manner. She’d been waiting. Lord, she’d been waiting, impatient when the winter rains kept Papa from the hunting, but at last they’d gone. She had a new dress because, though she was still slight around the rib cage and nimble at the waist, her old dress pulled across the armpits where her breasts had grown to fill her own surprised palms. Papa had given her money at Christmas, the same amount he’d spent on a new hunting coat and ear-flap cap for Lucius. Papa didn’t say what he expected her to do with it and seemed surprised when what she did was walk to the mercantile and buy a pattern, McCall’s “Misses Empire Dress, Suitable for Small Women,” along with five and three-eighths yards of fabric. She’d eyed a bolt of silk georgette crepe but knew it wouldn’t last, though the gossip would. Instead she selected cotton voile in “Copenhagen blue,” a name she said aloud on the walk home, whirling around after to make sure she was alone.

At her sewing table, she pinned the brown tissue to the fabric and chalked and scissored. Then she pieced it and stitched it and basted it, and she put it on and ran to show her father and then stood embarrassed as he looked up from the account books, embarrassed, and said nothing, and she said nothing, and turned and walked somberly away.

Clad in Copenhagen blue, Dixie Clay stood in the piney woods and heard Jesse’s music, almost as if he’d known she was finally alone. She ran to the house but when he crested the drive, she slowed to a stroll, even made herself toss the chickens some scratch. He’d grown a mustache, a fetching, fetching mustache. She’d baked a chess pie and hidden it from her brother under a tea towel in the icebox. She sliced it for Jesse, who ate two pieces, but she was too nervous to eat. When he left after the trading—she only got $3.40 but Lucius had buckshot both deer he’d managed to bring down—Jesse walked her out to the turpentine trees. They stood before a young pine with two V’s etched low into the trunk, last year’s V scarred over and, below it, the fresh cut she’d made that morning, oozing its honey-brown gum. Silently they watched the sweetness bead and stretch and elongate over the aluminum cup and finally, finally drop. The
plink
seemed loud.

Jesse reached and took her hand. “When there are two more slashes there,” he said, nodding to the trunk, “I’ll be back for you. I’ll take you to Mississippi.” And with his other hand he lifted her chin and she looked into those eyes, trees and water coming closer, and her own eyes closed and, yes, he kissed her.

Two more slashes: two more years. She would be sixteen. She loved the smell of pine trees now. She sometimes took her sewing to a stump in the piney woods.

She waited. What did she do while she waited? She went to Pine Grove School to satisfy the nosy neighbors, though she didn’t learn as much as she had at home with her papa and his books and maps and telescope. When she wasn’t at the schoolhouse, she canned and skinned and looked after the animals and tried out new recipes on her papa, and at the neighbors’ turpentine boil she granted each boy one dance and one dance only: she was waiting for Jesse Swan Holliver, because Jesse Swan Holliver was coming for her. And he did, he did come; she was sixteen and Jesse Swan Holliver courted her and married her and took her to Mississippi.

N
ow, in Mississippi, in Sugar Hill where Jesse had brought her, she’d finished the dishes and it was dark enough to shine. Willy started to rouse and she picked him up and he turned his head from side to side, searching for the smell of milk. She wished she could feed him from her body, as she had Jacob. When he’d fallen asleep while nursing and his lips slackened and fell off her nipple, she could see his tongue flexing a time or two, her creamy hind milk pooling there, or even leaking down his chin.

She carried Willy to the stove and patted his back, which melded to her body, curving over her chest and shoulder. She fixed the bottle and held it to his mouth and he sucked it with a determined round chewing motion she liked and then she wrapped him in the afghan and took him to the still.

Looking back, it surprised her, it always surprised her, how long it took her to learn she’d married a bootlegger. She’d been a smart girl, first in her class at Pine Grove School with figures and letters both, so all she could reckon was that she didn’t
want
to learn. Sometimes she’d imagine explaining it to a girlfriend, if she had one, just like it’d appeared to her as a new bride. The friend would reassure: “Dixie Clay, you couldn’t have guessed! No one could have guessed,” and the friend would hug her, and they would cry a bit and laugh a bit.

Because, looking back, the signs were everywhere. After the night at the Thomas Jefferson Hotel they’d made slow progress to Hobnob because most every time they met a buggy or motorcar, Jesse knew the driver. He’d pull up on the mules, and she saw how easy he was, telling a joke, asking after one man’s sick wife, after another’s new boat. It was this friendly manner Dixie Clay’s papa had been charmed by when Jesse’d come to ask for her hand. Of course her papa had asked him how he made his living if his part of Mississippi was no good for cotton and Jesse had spoken only of fur trading and shipping the furs south to New Orleans. Lucius had sat by Jesse’s feet like a hound treeing a coon. For dinner, Dixie Clay made a roast. Jesse waited until her papa had gone to the parlor before he asked Lucius, “What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?”

Lucius didn’t know.

“Anyone can roast beef.”

Lucius laughed so hard he snorted.

Yes, Jesse was charming. She wouldn’t have to explain that to her girlfriend. But his charm didn’t obscure certain oddities. On her second day as a bride, as they passed the sign saying
WELCOME TO HOBNOB,
a car pulled alongside them—a Dodge Brothers touring car, said Jesse—and the man in the passenger seat cranked the window down.

“How’s business?” he asked.

“Good and fixing to get gooder. Come out to Sugar Hill,” Jesse shouted over the motor. “I got what you’re looking for.”

As they drove on, Dixie Clay wondered—what furs did these men want? Also—why was his house named Sugar Hill? She wondered again when she saw the house, which wasn’t on a hill but in a wooded gully, at the end of a drive you’d pass without knowing unless you spied the crescents of wheels etching the turn. And why call it Sugar anything when cane wasn’t grown in these parts?

But she was surprised and pleased by the house. It had been built as a dogtrot with the open central hall, and when Jesse bought it he’d enclosed it and added onto the back, so now it had three rooms on either side. To the left, a parlor, dining room, and kitchen, and to the right, three bedrooms. Corner cabinets, a butler’s pantry, wainscoting up to the chair rails, an inside bathroom, electric lights that went on when you pushed a little circle in a box on the wall. A back door that headed into the woods, a screened front door that opened onto a deep shady gallery with straight chairs and rockers, bordered by a rail the perfect height, Jesse said, for resting boots. He was almost twenty and had no kin to speak of, so he must have selected the brass chandelier, the mahogany mantel clock, the valance curtains in blue silk trimmed with rose, and the Queen Anne walnut bedroom set for which he was making payments of twenty-two dollars a month. The house matched him, his clean oval nails and waxed mustache.

“How do you like your new house, Mrs. Holliver?” She was standing on the front gallery and looking to the west, and Jesse had come behind her.

“I am well pleased, Mr. Holliver.”

He rested his chin on her head and slid his hands around her waist and squeezed to make his fingers touch. He was shorter than average, but she was so slight that their bodies fit like a dovetail joint.

She continued, “Of course—do you think—maybe the drive is a bit overgrown?”