A Parchment of Leaves (11 page)

Esme was acting a sight, as if she was certain she might never see him again. I had never seen her cry before, and she was pitiful in the process. She was the kind of woman who sort of curled her whole body into her handkerchief, heaving with great force each time a wave of tears swept over her. I ran my hand around her back and patted her shoulder, but this seemed to make her all the worse.

“Just be glad I ain't been drafted yet,” Saul said.

We walked down the footpath toward the mouth of the holler, where Saul's little truck was parked. The county men had just started building a bridge there so that they could make a road up into God's Creek. Before long we would be able to pull our vehicles right up to the house. Saul was tickled to death on this account, but I hated it. They had to cut down trees to build the road, and I knew that cars would be rumbling in and out of the holler once that road sliced through.

When we got to the truck, Esme fell against him like a heap of wet clothes.

“Now, Mama, what's wrong with you?” he asked. “I ain't going to the war. Lord God, you're acting a sight.”

“Pretty soon it'll just be me and Vine. They'll call Aaron overseas before long.”

“You don't know that,” Saul said. His voice was as soothing as balm when he talked to her. He always spoke to her in this gentle way that I gathered he had learned from his father.

Aaron come down the holler on his horse and barely let it stop trotting before he slung his leg over its back and jumped down to the ground. He hugged Saul, wrapping both arms tightly about him, and then stepped back. “I'll see to them,” Aaron said.

“You won't have to worry much with these two,” Saul said, and laughed. “They can fend for theirself.”

He pulled me to him with one arm flat against my back and kissed me. He kissed me long and hard and he told me that he loved me, right there in front of Esme and Aaron. I looked away when he told Birdie good-bye.

He got into his truck, lifted his hand, and pulled away. And that was all. He drove away that simply, as if he was just running to the store and would be back in a few minutes. But I was convinced that he would not return. Little did I know that it would be me who would be gone when he did come back for good. The woman I was that day would soon be no more.

T
hat summer was the hottest anyone could remember. Heat bugs sang from daylight to dark and the tin roof on our house cracked and popped like it would pull free of its nails and fly away at any minute. The animals all crowded into whatever shade they could find, their tails slapping at the flies that tortured them. Often a short rain would fall very early in the morning; as if out of nowhere it pelted the earth, then seemed to be sucked back up into the sky. But it never rained during the day, and it never rained for very long at all. Still, my garden flourished. It took the morning rain and tucked this away to sip on throughout the day. The mountains took on a dark green shine, and the blackberries growed so thick that they nearly broke down their bushes. When I saw this, I could not refuse the temptation.

I suffered under the white July sun to gather the blackberries. The bramble growed close to the creek, vines of brier drooping over so far that some of the berries bobbed on top of the foamy water. I stood in the wild creek, but the cool water was no relief—the cold
spread no further than my ankles. Sweat dripped from my forehead and down my neck and chest, but I didn't take time to wipe it away. I reckoned the faster I got a gallon of berries picked, the sooner I would be able to seek better shade. The dusty pines that stood nearest me were thin and runted. The heat bugs screamed.

The bridge stood on the other side of the creek from me, and whenever vehicles passed over, it moaned beneath their weight, sending a flurry of dust my way. The bridge popped and cracked so much that I thought the lumber might be splintering in two. There had been plenty of passing cars earlier—people laying on their horns and leaning out their windows to holler my name—since it was Saturday, but for the last hour no one had passed. It seemed like there was nothing in the world except the creek, sounding like boiling water, and the snaps the stems made when I plucked the berries from their roost. I fancied that I could hear things others could not: the steam rising up out of the earth, the quiet thunder of sunrays that beat against my back.

My fingers were solid purple. The juice had clotted in the cuts that the thorns had streaked across my hands. The bucket was heavy. I moved on down the creek, watching my footing on the slick rocks, and shed the last limbs of their load. At last I had a full gallon, and even under the coat of dust from the road, the blackberries shone in the sun.

I was so hot I could barely move. I put the bucket on a rock shelf and set right down in the creek without even thinking about it. The creek struck me at the waist, so I cupped my hands and throwed water up over my chest and my face. I soaked my hair. I couldn't remember ever being so hot. The air seemed like a solid thing when I tried to breathe it, as if I stood at the mouth of a furnace. The creek moved like a fever around me: swirling, sloshing, finding its way. I couldn't imagine where so much water was coming from—it hadn't rained in days and the earth was a hard, cracked thing that stopped a hoe or a shovel. I laid back against the bank and let the water cool me.

Then I felt the sensation of being watched—an odd feeling that started in my gut and worked its way up the back of my neck. When I opened my eyes, Aaron was standing at the edge of the bridge, looking down at me. He didn't change his expression when I caught sight of him. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets, his mouth a straight white line. His head was cocked a little bit, like a man considering something that he could not put a name to. His hair hung down in his eyes, and somehow this give him the air of being proud and full of himself.

I didn't know what else to do, so I just let out a soft laugh. “Aaron? How long you been there?” I asked. I put my arms across my chest out of fear that the water had caused my blouse to go see-through.

“Watching you,” he said. He seemed not even to blink his eyes. “How does it feel?”

“To be watched?”

“No.” He smiled, a slow movement that overtook his face. “The water.”

I set there for a long minute without saying a word. I wanted to stand up, to be ready to get away from him, but I refused to stand and let my dress stick to me. I acted like I wasn't bothered, though. “It feels good after you've stood in the sun two hours picking berries,” I said.

He squatted down, spread his hands out on the big rocks, and climbed down the bank. His hands tore at the ivy that had attached itself to the stones. His feet splashed into the water. His side of the creek was deeper and he waded toward me, the water up to his waist. The creek bed rose at a slow grade, and he walked up out of it until he stood in water that was only calf-deep. He did not hide the bulge that his soaked pants made plain for me to see. When he got near me, he sat down right in front of me, so close that our knees nearly touched. He put a single finger out and brushed the hair off of my forehead. I flinched. I held my breath, feeling like I was waiting on something.

“You're so beautiful, Vine. The best-looking woman I ever seen.”

All at once I was too mad to care what he could see, and I stood right up. The water fell from my body in great blocks. I jerked the bucket from the cliff and held it in front of me, as if it might protect me from harm.

“You shouldn't say such things to your sister-in-law. It's not right.”

He got up and put his hand on my shoulder. As his arm stretched out, I could hear the crackle of his wet shirtsleeve, and I felt his fingers through the cloth of my blouse. “You know how I feel. You've knowed for a time now,” he said.

The water seemed to grow louder and faster. I
could
hear the sun beating down on us, I was sure of it.

“How could you betray your brother like this?” I asked. “He loves you more than anything in this world. More than me, even.”

“But I love you more than I do him,” he whispered, like he was afraid the woods would overhear, but also like this made an intimacy between us. “Leave here with me, Vine.”

I shook his hand away and splashed past him. I stomped up the shoals of the creek, back toward the head of the holler, back toward the house. I hugged that bucket to my chest. The wet dress hung from me like deadweight, but I didn't let it hinder my escape. The rocks were crooked and slick, but I managed them like I was walking up a flat road. Even so, I could feel him right behind me, struggling to keep up. And then real sudden he caught me by the elbow and pulled me around to face him.

“You know you want to. This is a big world. We could go anywhere.”

“You talk such foolishness, Aaron,” I said. “I love Saul. Not you! You've lost your mind.”

He grabbed both of my shoulders in his big hands. “But I want you,” he said, and I looked into his eyes. They were pale and dead. He shook me, shook me so hard that I lost hold of the bucket. The berries poured out in one shining clump and bobbed down the creek in a thin purple ribbon.

I pushed him away from me with all of my strength, and he stumbled around on the rocks before steadying himself and looking into my eyes as if he were in wild pain.

“You leave here!” I screamed. “You leave this place, or I'll tell Esme what you've said. She'll believe me, too. She'll see I'm telling the truth. I'll write Saul and tell him.”

I left him standing in the middle of the creek. I climbed the steep bank and walked down the parched road without looking back, the water from my skirts staining the dust.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I left Birdie asleep in the bed we shared, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I had coffee only once a week, since I was too stingy to buy it often. That morning, I intended to enjoy it. I tried to make it as dark and bitter as Mama did, but I failed. I needed a taste of home, but I had never been able to get the flavor Mama could boil up with ease.

I looked around the house at all I had to do and wondered if I might be able to get everything done in time to ride over to Redbud to see my people. The stove needed cleaning out. The floors had to be swept every day because of the never-ending dust that flew in off the road. And I knowed if I didn't pick the beans, they would bake in the solid heat that was sure to come down on the creek later in the day.

I tried to shake all of this from my mind, as well as the run-in with Aaron the day before. It was too much to calculate, and I didn't want to think about any of it. I went out onto the porch to have my coffee. Daylight had just broke, but it was already warm. A little breeze drifted down. The new sun caused many smells to seep out of the earth. Everything on the mountain seemed to be sending its scent down to me: the musk from the cedars, the wetness of moss that laid beneath dripping cliffs. Birds called and sang, announcing morning. Later, when the sun became a blazing thing at the top of the sky, the birds would go so far into the shady woods that their songs would not come to me. I sipped the coffee and tried to savor the taste of it enough to get me through the week.

I closed my eyes and imagined what Saul was doing. He had probably been up since the day was still black, and now he sawed down giant pines that would be cut and mashed until their wood could make turpentine. I wondered where the turpentine that my own man made would go. Italy or France, I guessed. People talked about the western front all of the time, but I didn't know where that was. The soldiers wouldn't have no idea that the turpentine had come from a ridge in Kentucky, and would not care. I daydreamed about Saul's big shoulders—he would be bare chested, and his freckles would shine beneath a layer of sweat. I imagined his hands, the flat determination of his face, his quiet laughter when one of the other men told a long, funny story. The other men probably respected him above all others: men always respect another man who is quiet. They remember him even more clearly than they do the man who laughs the loudest.

I always thought of him working and could not imagine what he did when his shift was over. In his letters he said he worked right alongside his men, even though he was the foreman. I wondered if he ever went into town. Wildcat Mountain was close to London, and that was a big place with a movie theater, restaurants, a federal courthouse, and three banks. For the life of me, I could not picture him going into London and buying his own shaving lather or walking into the drugstore to sit down to have a Coca-Cola. I had never even seen him drink a pop before. I wondered if he laid awake at night, thinking of me and Birdie, before he drifted off to sleep.

I patted my apron pocket and found the letter I had took from the post office the day before. Saul said things in his letters that he would have never let escape his lips. This struck me as odd. It seemed to me that a man who don't announce what his heart wants to say would hesitate at putting it down in writing. Words become solid on the air when spoken, but quickly drift away. Ink lasts always.

The letter was short but full. I unfolded it and admired his small, crooked writing. His handwriting made me picture him hunched low
over the paper, his face close to the nib of the pen. I thought about the way the tips of his fingers looked when he had finished a letter: black from the leaking fountain pen, maybe even a smear across his fine cheekbones. Saul began each letter with two words that I knowed for certain I would never hear him say aloud:

My darling,

It is a bad time all round. We have cut down all the trees atop this big mountain. It is the ugliest thing you ever seen in yore life. It has not rained here in near a month and I have to watch them close to make sure nobody does anything to cause the hills to catch fire. I can't even let them smoke when we are cutting. Only when we are in the bunkhouse. If you'd tap a cigret ash down on the ground I believe the whole woods would blaze up, as it is dry as a chip.