The Truest Pleasure (7 page)

“So you can rile a snake and then it will bite me,” I said. It was an old joke.

“I've got on heavier shoes,” Tom said.

I wanted to hurry, but the thought of snakes made me go slow. I was pushed ahead and held back at the same time. But Tom walked real slow, listening before he took a step. Pilots don't make a sound, except when they crawl. Crickets stopped when we got close, then started up again behind us. I held Tom's arm, and it was like he was working and searching. Walking without stepping on a snake was a job and he was going to do it well. Everything for him was work. To me everything he did was wonderful.

“What is that?” Tom said, and stopped.

There was a rustling in the grass. I held my breath and listened. It sounded like a mouse running. But all was dark, and I couldn't see Tom in front of me. “What is it?” I said.

“No!” Tom said, and jumped back, kicking in the dark. He stomped the grass, and I heard something flopping around.

“What is it?” I said.

He stomped on the ground like he was trying to put out a fire. “Stay back,” he said.

“What is it?”

He kicked at something again. “I can't see,” he said.

Then he started on down the trail and I followed him. It seemed he was limping a little, but I couldn't be sure. I didn't hold his arm anymore, but stayed a foot or two behind him. He seemed to drag his foot in the grass.

There was a light on in the house, and Pa had left the door open so a streak of lamplight fell across the porch. Tom climbed up the steps and stood in the light. “Get me a stick,” he said.

There was a pile of stovewood on the porch and I brought him a piece. He slammed the wood down hard on the porch
near his foot. I strained my eyes in the dim light and saw a snake there, a little snake. The tail was twitching.

Pa come to the door and asked what was it.

“Bring a light,” Tom said.

“Where did the snake come from?” I said.

Pa returned with the lamp and held it down close to Tom's leg. I bent over to see better. There was a little copperhead laying there with its back broke. “Did it bite you?” I said.

It was the strangest thing you ever saw. The snake fangs had gone into the leather of Tom's shoe and I guess they had got stuck. Then when he jumped back and started kicking and stomping, the head had got tangled in his laces. I reckon he had half killed the snake by stomping on it. And then he dragged it all the way to the house because he couldn't see what had happened.

He held the snake down with the piece of wood and untangled and untied the laces. Where the snake's fangs had gone into the leather it was all wet with venom. It looked like somebody had poured syrup on the shoe. Of course there was dew on the shoe also, and pieces of grass and clover blossoms.

When the snake was loose from the strings Tom mashed its head with the stick of wood.

“I never saw such a little pilot,” I said.

“It's a young snake,” Tom said.

“Young snakes are just as poison as big ones,” Pa said.

There was two tears in the leather where the fangs had gone in. “I wouldn't touch that place,” I said.

“It won't hurt unless you have a cut in your skin,” Tom said.

“Come on in,” Pa said. “I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”

The light hurt my eyes when we went inside. I blinked like I
was waking up. The smell of fresh coffee filled the house. Pa always did know how to make the best coffee. I think he learned during the Confederate War when coffee was so scarce you had to make every bean count. There is nothing like the smell of coffee. It fills the air and suggests richness and confidence, earth and harvests. It makes you feel like taking hold of things.

“I never seen nothing like that,” Pa said, looking at Tom's shoe. “You got lucky.”

“I was,” Tom said.

Joe had long gone back to his own house across the hill. While Pa commenced to tell about the rattlesnake he saw as a boy that laid in wait for people on a high bank and could jump across the road, I started to make biscuits to go with the coffee. I already had the dough made up, and I just rolled it out, cut the biscuits, and baked them. I had made the dough because I thought Tom was coming. Or I had hoped he was coming.

The men kept talking, or rather Pa kept talking and Tom did the listening. I saw right off they could get along.

“It was common during the war,” Pa said, “for boys to wake in the morning with snakes laying on their blankets. They crawled there for warmth I reckon. A snake ain't got no heat of its own. Gets chilled it can't hardly move. A cold snake is sleepy and won't bite you. You could pick up a cold snake and lay it on your cheek and it wouldn't bite you.”

“A snake gets too hot it dies,” Tom said.

“I reckon a hot snake bleeds to death inside,” Pa said. “A snake gets too hot its veins melt. I seen one trapped in a sand pit by the river one time and it died by dinnertime from the hot sun. I reckon it just baked inside.”

“Have some biscuits,” I said. I put the plate of hot biscuits on the table, and brought plates and knives and a jar of sorghum. I poured a cup of coffee for each of us and brought a pat of butter from the back porch. I used my fanciest painted dish which usually leaned on the top shelf.

“That's a pretty dish,” Tom said.

“Locke sent me that from the Philippines,” I said.

I set down and we drunk the rich coffee and eat hot biscuits. Biscuits are good in the morning, but even better late at night. We passed the butter back and forth, and the jar of molasses.

“Hard to make it come out even,” Tom said, after he had eat three or four biscuits.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“To make the butter and molasses and biscuits come out even,” he said. “So you don't end up with some left on your plate.”

“Then you just have to keep eating,” Pa said. We all laughed. We was feeling merry like people do when they have good food and fellowship. You start to get a little drunk I guess when you have rich coffee and sweet biscuits.

“Can't stop until the biscuits are all gone,” I said.

“These molasses was cooked too long,” Tom said.

“How do you know?” I said. I quit laughing and looked at Pa.

“Cause I make molasses for the Lewises,” Tom said. “These molasses is good, but a little bit thick.”

“Pa makes good molasses,” I said.

“No, Tom is right,” Pa said. “I did overcook these a little bit. The cows got out, remember, and I had to round them up. When I got back the batch had cooked too long.”

“Better overcooked than undercooked,” Tom said.

Sometimes when I was young I could almost taste the future. At times the sense of tomorrow delighted me so I could barely think of the present. Every instant was a threshold to the next, and every place I stood was the beginning of a new long journey.

It was a mood I had often, this thrilling sense of time arriving and arriving in an endless flood of blessing. I was wealthy in time. The next minute and the next hour, the next day and the next year, was shining with promise.

My sense of the future was more like New Year's than any other holiday. Christmas was thrilling with its carols and candles, brilliant wrappings, cakes and cookies, oranges and spirit of giving, its mystery of birth and lighted trees, and hush at midnight. But it was after the holiday was over, after the tree was down and the mistletoe and turkey's paw throwed out, the gifts put away and wrappings folded to be used next year, and the last of the cakes and hard candies eat, that the best pleasure come. It was the return to the ordinary, to everyday life on New Year's Day, that moved me most. With the decorations put away and the trimmings, there was such openness in the house. There was a spirituality in the absence and emptiness. The morning of New Year's Day the light was different.

I would get so excited I walked in the pasture without a coat just to feel the sweet wind, and newness of the air. I was so happy the holidays was over and we could return to ordinary days, the opportunity of day following day, that I glided over the grass. The ground looked washed clean by rain or snow, and the broomsedge and pines looked waxed and polished.

I can remember shivering with the mystery of space around me. It was too good to dream of that there was so much space to move through and breathe and use. That's when I felt closest to God, when the air was towering above and curving around me. I looked up the river valley to the far mountains, and I pondered the warm nest of myself in the whipping breeze.

Sometimes I run through the pasture and into the pine woods beyond the hill, then along the river where winter pools was low and clear. I run on the trail above the barn and through the orchard and along the ridge above the spring. And then I would go inside and set in the dim bedroom to calm myself. It took several minutes before I could look at things up close again.

But I would also calm myself thinking about the future. I thought how I didn't have to do anything to make the future arrive. It just come to me, as if floating on a long river.

But when I was about fifteen the strangest thing happened. I was a tall awkward girl with these big feet and big hands and everybody kept saying, “Ginny's growing up to be a pretty girl” and “Ginny's going to be a tall woman.” But they kept saying it year after year, and I come to see they meant I was ugly now but I might look better later on.

Except as the years passed I kept looking the same. I knowed things was supposed to happen to a girl to make her grow into a woman, but I wasn't sure exactly what. Mama had died when I was nine, and all I had was Pa and Florrie to tell me about things. Pa never did like to talk about female things, and Florrie was already courting and ignored me as much as she could.

But I felt something was wrong, though I didn't know exactly what. And I certainly didn't know what to do about it. Florrie liked to say things like “Ginny ain't never going to grow up as long as she keeps her nose in a book.” I knowed that Florrie had her monthlies and she kept rags which got soaked with blood and which she washed on the back porch and hung to dry. And she talked about how awful she felt sometimes, and the pain she had. And she liked to take powders or a drink at times for the pain. I figured it would happen to me in time and I was scared.

Nothing angered Florrie like when she thought some blood had soaked through her dress and she had to run to her room and change. Sometimes she throwed things then and banged pots together, and talked about “the curse.”

For a long time I feared what was going to happen to me, and then I feared nothing was going to happen. I waited month after month and I was still awkward and gangly and my chest flat and my hips narrow. I could tell Pa worried too, though he never said anything. He didn't know what to say to a girl about her body.

“How are you feeling?” Pa would ask from time to time.

“I'm fine,” I would say. He asked so many times I finally said, “Do you want me to be sick?” He turned red a little bit.
But when I snapped at Pa he never answered back. And then I felt worse for flying off.

In the end I guess he asked Florrie to talk to me. She come into the bedroom and said, “Ginny, there's something I have to know, that Pa wants to know.”

I turned to face her, already angry. It was like she was accusing me of some fault. “What have I done this time?” I said.

“It's what you ain't,” she said. “Have you had any bleeding?”

“I bleed when I am cut,” I said.

“I mean bleeding in your . . . you know what I mean,” she said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because it's time. Because you are old enough,” Florrie said.

“And what if I don't?” I said.

“Then you won't have children. Only a woman that has monthlies can have children.”

It was like she was accusing me yet again of being wrong. I run out of the room and out of the house. I run all the way to the springhouse and stood under the hemlocks there and cried.

Florrie didn't say anything more for a few days, and of course Pa didn't say anything either. But after about a week Mama's brother, Dr. Johns, come by and said he wanted to talk to me. Everybody disappeared and left me alone with him. He smelled like whiskey, as he always did when making his rounds. Whiskey was the medicine he mostly prescribed, and he always took a little hisself. But he was my favorite uncle. He liked to tease me. He said if I kept reading books I would be a doctor myself some day. He said my black hair made me look like an Indian or a gypsy. When I was little he brought horehound candy in his doctor's bag. I imagined the candy smelled
like the whiskey on his breath. I even wondered if horehound candy might make you drunk.

“Ginny,” he said to me. He made me set on the sofa in the living room, and he set down beside me. He was no bigger than I was, and seemed like a little boy hisself except for his gray beard. He had a gold watch chain that flashed in the firelight. “Ginny,” he said, “do you ever feel sluggish, or heavy, or a little crazy from time to time?”

“Only when I have work to do,” I said.

Dr. Johns laughed, and looked me right in the eyes. “Do you ever feel pains in your belly?” he said. “Deep in your belly?”

“Only when I eat too many apples,” I said.

“You're too smart for me,” he said.

“You can give me one of your tonics,” I said.

“I
am
going to give you a tonic,” the doctor said. “I want you to take a tablespoon three times a day, before each meal.”

He handed me this bottle of black stuff. It was like a thin syrup, and you had to shake it before taking any. It was the color of Co-Cola but it didn't fizz up when shook. I don't know what all it was, except some herbs Dr. Johns had concocted for his female tonic and he sold it all over the county when he made his rounds. There was so much whiskey in the mixture it tasted like a cordial, except it had an aftertaste of anise or licorice. When I took it I tried to imagine it was some elixir that would make me beautiful with full breasts and voluptuous hips.