The Truest Pleasure (20 page)

When that day was over I was wore out from trying to keep Florrie and Lily apart. I promised myself I never would let Lily help us can peaches again, and I didn't.

In the summer of 1904 we made our biggest garden ever. I could tell Tom felt bad for not showing more sympathy to me. The truth is that only concern for other people eases our own grief, and Tom had not showed much concern until he set down on the bed after the funeral. Soon as he took my hand and cared that my heart was broke I think he started to feel a little better. I could tell he saw in me then the girl he had married. At that moment the emptiness we both felt started to go away.

By July I was pretty much well again, and figured the best way to show my friendship with Tom was to help in the fields. I went out with him every day and left Jewel and Moody at the house with Pa. I had always done my share of work outside, but that hot summer I pitched in like a field hand. It was what needed to be done, and it was what I needed to do. If you sweat enough it will cleanse you. If you have a cold or feel you're taking sick sometimes a good sweat will heal you. As I worked in the dirt by Tom I felt I was being cleansed from inside.

And nothing makes a woman feel better than to pitch in and work alongside her husband. I didn't wear shoes, and it felt like the dirt itself healed me. The hot ground drawed the poisons and ill will through the soles of my feet.

The dirt by the river was moist, even in the hot dry weeks. Working in the loam you could feel the cool of the river way down under the topsoil, and at times you could even feel the movement of the river like a pulse, and hear the whisper and swallow of the stream going over rocks and riffles.

Tom had planted more corn and beans and peas and taters and watermelons than ever before. He had planted the new ground at the upper end of the bottom and he planted the terraces in the orchard above the barn. It seemed like he had put every foot of available land in crops of one sort or another. There was butter beans and crowder peas, squash and pumpkins, tomatoes and onions. He planted twice as much cane as he had the year before.

Every morning after breakfast we went out to pull weeds and hoe dirt around the stalks and vines. There is a thrill to cleaning a row, getting rid of ragweeds and bull nettles. The hardest thing is to take morning glories out of corn, for they wind up the stalks and wrap theirselves tight on the leaves. You have to find the bottom of the vine and cut it, or pull it out. When you weed a row it feels like things has been sorted out and clarified. You have made sense of something.

A small lake and cottonmill had been built down the river on the other side of the Turnpike, and they was putting up more houses there. They built a powerhouse below the lake to run the mill, and the new houses would have electricity and running water, it was said. But folks working in the mill didn't have time or land for gardens. And they couldn't keep cows and chickens. Tom had found a market there for cider and firewood. He guessed the hands from the flatlands would need vegetables too.

One day in July Tom loaded the Studebaker wagon with sweet peas, fresh corn and beans, tomatoes and squash. He had taters and lima beans we had picked after daylight. He had done a half day's work before milking time. By the middle of the morning he was ready to peddle door to door among the new two-room houses.

All day I did the washing and hung it out in the hot wind. That evening it come up a thunderstorm, as it will in July, and I just barely had time to run and get my clothes in. Tom come back later, completely soaked. He had tried to stop Old Dan under a tree, but the wind swept the rain right on him. He come dripping to the house and set by the hearth. He looked wet as a dog. But he reached into his pocket and pulled out dimes and quarters give him by the mill people. I thought he was mad at first, he looked so bedraggled by rain. I had started a fire in the fireplace to dry some of the towels. Tom bent before the fire and counted coins on the hearth. He put quarters in one pile and dimes in another. He had a few half-dollars and nickels, and one silver dollar. He counted it up in the firelight. There was almost ten dollars. I never saw such a happy look on his face. Tom was not one to show much pleasure. But he couldn't cover the smile as he added up the earnings for the day.

“Take off them wet clothes before you get sick,” I said.

“A good soaking makes you feel clean,” he said. He put the money in the cigar box he used for a bank.

I had always been a worker by fits and spells. But that summer I found I could work steady. We got up at four or five, and Pa was already up and reading his Bible at the table. By the time
Tom had milked I had breakfast ready. We drunk several cups of Pa's coffee before going to the fields in early light. Every bit of work was precious. I found myself thinking like Tom that summer. A woman naturally comes to think like her husband sometimes. I thought of every squash as so many pennies, and every row as so many quarters. I saw green leaves turning into dimes, and gold roots and veins in leaves turning into silver dollars. Every bit of soil come to promise its secret of money.

In the early morning cucumbers was cool as jars of ice water. I reached into wet leaves and plucked the firm beans. The crust on the soil was breaking as new taters swelled under it. Every tater we got out was that much more wealth. Tom had always sold eggs down at the store. But the vegetables was something extra. It was his idea, beyond anything Pa had ever made on the place.

My face and arms turned dark as an Indian's that summer. I always did tan easy, but that summer I didn't even wear a straw hat. Florrie teased me for getting so dark. “You will look like a field hand,” she said. “Lily may not speak to you.”

My arms and shoulders got strong again, and I helped Tom pull fodder and stack it in the barnloft. In September I helped strip the cane, while Jewel and Moody played at the end of the rows.

Fodder pulling is supposed to be the worst job there is. The fields are hot and dusty by late August, and you strip the leaves off corn below the ears, after the tops have been cut and stacked in shocks to dry. The heat and the dust, rough rasping leaves, will give you a rash. And you can easy put a hand on a packsaddle worm that will sting you in ten places. If a packsaddle nails you nothing will put out the fire on your hand for days. It is worse than ten hornet stings.

After both hands tear off leaves and are full, you put the bunches together and tie them, wrapping one leaf around and through the middle. You stick that hand on a stalk until you have enough to tie into a bundle. When the bundles are carried to the barnloft to cure, they fill the barn with a scent sweeter than tobacco or tea. Fodder is too rich and tender to give to cows. The sugary lower leaves of the corn are saved for the horse.

The work in the sun and the sunburn acted like a spur to our lovemaking. It was as if the heat of July and August stored up in our veins and skin as a fever to be quenched by love in the hours of darkness. Never had I seemed to need less sleep. After he got home each evening, milked and washed and had supper, Tom counted the money he had made. The coins shined like little flames and faces on the hearth. The bills crackled as he smoothed them in booklets. Afterwards he put the money in the cigar box.

As he counted the money, we talked about what we needed to buy for winter, for the children and for the place. Jewel would start school that fall, and needed new clothes. “You have to dress your girls nicer than boys,” Tom said.

As soon as the children was asleep Tom and me went to bed ourselves. Pa was reading in the kitchen, and we tried not to disturb him. When Locke come on furlough for a week he slept on the couch and we tried to be careful not to bother him as we giggled in the dark and tried to keep the bed from creaking.

It was as if we was not ourselves some nights, but bigger and more powerful, more perfect, as we would want to be. The
day had been a long delay and build-up of fever toward the summer night. And it felt like we couldn't do anything wrong. Every place we touched was right, and every pause was right. Everything we did in the dark led to something new and better.

As a girl I would not have thought a man of forty was capable of such exertions, or a woman of thirty-four for that matter. At moments of joy I felt this was what all the feeling of my life had been tending toward, including my shouting and dancing at meetings. It was all just a preparation for this.

But I put such thoughts out of mind for they was blasphemous. I may have felt them, but I didn't want to think them, least of all to say them. Long as I didn't put my feelings in words they was innocent. Kept at the edge of thought they couldn't hurt.

And I told myself lovemaking was also worship and praise. I told myself it was through love we take part in God's creation.

I remember one night in August special. We had picked beans in the far end of the bottom and Tom sold them by the bushel to women in the village. I reckon he had made more than ten dollars. But on the way home the axle of the wagon broke. I don't know why it broke. Maybe the extra hauling had wore it out. Tom had stuck in a sapling to hold up the wheel till he got home. The new axle would cost ten dollars, so the day had been wasted, he felt.

Now I have noticed that loving is best when you're feeling real good, or sometimes when you're feeling a little bad. If you're feeling a mite low you resist lovemaking at first, and then it comes like a blessing. And your body takes over and reminds you of things you had forgot. The body has its own
wisdom and its own will, and sometimes it knows what you need most.

That night I saw Tom needed to be cheered up. I took a full bath in the tub in the bedroom, and made myself rosy and soft. I put on powder and rubbed on cologne. By the time I had finished Tom had already gone to bed. I knowed he was tired, and when you want to forget some loss or bad news nothing is as comforting as sleep. In fact, I think he might already have been asleep when I put out the lamp and got in bed.

But as I slipped under the covers I could feel him waking. First, it was the way he stirred and was quiet in his breathing. Then he pushed against me a little, just enough to show it was intended. It's strange how much a little pressure tells you.

Well I won't go into detail. Folks got no right to hear what married couples do. But it was a time I never forgot. The katydids was out, loud in the woods beyond the orchard. And there was crickets in the yard, meadow moles with their mellow note. After the heat of the day the house was cracking and knocking.

But I soon forgot the sounds in the dark. Time got big and magnified. The dark was lit with purple fires. I could feel colors through my fingertips and through every place I touched.

And we had so much time. Every instant was stretched out, and stretched further. Our bodies was big as landscapes and mountains and we had all the time in the world to climb and cross them. There was no hurry, never had been. There was years for a kiss.

It was also like a patient waiting. We was in no hurry because we knowed something would be give to us. I thought about the beans we had picked that day, and how beans get
hard when they are ready to pick. You could pick beans just by the feel of them. With your fingers you could tell the pulses in a bean, and then count the beans into a basket.

I thought of Solomon again. “I
am
my beloved's, and his desire
is
toward me,” I whispered. The words seemed perfect in the dark. “I
am
a wall, and my breasts are like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favor,” I said.

We did some things new that night. Don't matter exactly what, but they was new to us. It was like we found out more things about each other. I guess it was like climbing way up a beautiful mountain past ridges and hollers. Laboring up a slope you think you are almost at the top, but when you get there see it is a false peak, and the real summit is higher and further.

The smells of the body are thrilling, the scent of armpits and sweat on skin. The skin has its own savors and salts. It is the salt of memory and wit and laughter. There is the salt that wakes you up, and salt like the taste of rocks deep in the ground.

“Tom,” I said. I had never been one to talk much while making love. Before, it had felt better to be hushed. “Tom,” I said again, “this is the best thing, ain't it?”

He didn't say anything. He was waiting for me to say more.

“Tom,” I said, “we won't never know anything this real.”

It was like the dark was smoothing out in contours of pasture hills and deep valleys lined with fur and velvet.

“I can see where the sky touches the ground,” I said, “and it's smooth as milk.”

There was rivers of sparks in the soil and they swirled through the dark and spread in wind to the end of the earth. It was a warm Nile flooding out of soil, lifting higher and higher.

“This is the place,” I said, “ain't it?”

Tom still didn't say anything. He was waiting for me to go on. He never liked to waste a single word. It was for me to say things to him.

“This is the place it all starts,” I said. “This is the place of creation.”

And then in the dark I could see Tom's face. I don't know how I did in the pitch dark. Maybe there was heat lightning, or maybe a meteor outside. But I saw Tom's face, and his eyes was looking right into mine, like he saw what I was thinking and feeling. He could see and feel any part of me. Even if he laid still he could feel every inch of me that was moving.

“Tom!” I said. And then I knowed my talking made another kind of sense. It wasn't daylight talk with its words and sentences. It was a higher kind of talk. And it come to me I was speaking in tongues. It was the first time I had spoke in tongues outside a service. I didn't know what I was saying, but I saw what was visited upon me was a gift. “Tom!” I said, and my mouth flew like a bird and my tongue soared. I gripped and sung out and didn't hardly know what I was doing. I was on a long journey that went on and on over banks and gullies, valleys and mountains of flowers. The whole world was coming to us in the dark.