A Parchment of Leaves (2 page)

“What is it?” she asked, leaning down and looking into the boy's face. His eyes were rolled back in his head. He had either died or fainted; she couldn't distinguish which.

“Snakebit. It was a copperhead—I seen it go off.”

“Vine?” her mother called from the yard, but Vine did not turn to answer. She sank to her knees and found the wound on the back of the boy's right shoulder. She pressed two fingers against it. Already the blood had hardened there.

“Give me your knife,” she said, and put her hand out without looking at the horseman. She kept her eyes on the bite.

He seemed not to hear her; he was smoothing the boy's bangs out of his eyes and rocking him. “Shh, shh,” he whistled, even though the boy was not making a sound.

“Your knife, I said!”

She dug the blade deep into the pulsating wound, and the boy suddenly squirmed beneath her. “Be still,” she said, hateful and firm. She cut a straight line between the marks of the fangs.

“Vine?” her mother called again. She had come down out of the house and was standing at the fence, watching them.

“Mama, get me the snake medicines,” she said.

The man began rocking his brother again. Tears did not show on
his face, but he made the low, guttural sounds of crying. “Mother of God,” he said, over and over. “Aaron.”

“Be still, I told you,” she hollered. Suddenly her mother was kneeling down beside her. Vine threw the latch on the lid of the jar and held the wound open with two fingers. She poured in the thick yellow liquid and it quickly began to boil and bubble. Her mother held out the crock of hog fat, and Vine dipped out a great handful. She smoothed the lard over the moving gash until the bubbling subsided.

“Give me your apron, Mama.” Vine tore three strips of cloth from the apron and wound them loosely about the boy's shoulder, tying it in a small, neat knot.

The boy had passed out and lay limp in the man's arms, his face smooth. “He's dead,” the man said. “My brother is dead.”

“Naw, he ain't dead. That'll cure him.” Vine pulled her skirt up to her knee and pointed to a wrinkled pink scar on her ankle. “It cured me when I was struck.”

Vine's mother got up and went back into the house, her heavy stride making it obvious that she did not approve of Vine's hiking up her skirt. The man looked at her without blinking.

“Pack him on back to your house and let him rest long as he will. He'll be full of life once he comes to,” she said, and smiled. “You'll have to make him stay in the bed.”

The man did not move, and in that instant she considered him. His face was well made and his eyes were green as the river water in autumn, but it was his bare shoulders that held her attention. They were dappled with freckles, some tiny, some big as corn kernels. She wondered if his whole body was so beautifully decorated. His skin was covered in a mixture of sweet-smelling sweat and dust from the dry road. She felt like reaching out to wipe away the clump of mud that had somehow caked itself around his brown nipple.

“What was that you put on him?” he asked.

“Snakeweed. An old man up in here put a copperhead and a blacksnake up to fight,” she said. “When the copperhead struck, the
blacksnake took off and the old man followed it. It went to a clump of weed beneath the cliffs yonder and latched on until it had sucked all of the juice out. The snake was healed, so the old man made juice of them weeds, and everybody on this creek uses it.”

“And it works?”

She laughed at his look of astonishment. “I ain't no witch, like they say. You live amongst snakes long enough, and you know how to cure their doings.”

T
HE WOUND HEALED
whole and tight, with just the scar of the knife blade as a reminder. Even though Saul told everyone that the Cherokee girl had saved Aaron's life, none of them would hear of it. They said she was the very one who had willed the snake to strike in the first place. The only reason Aaron hadn't died, they said, was that his mother had prayed over him for hours.

“That Indian willed it to keep that land from being cleared,” they said, “and she's won.”

Saul did not go back to Redbud Camp to clear the land, but not because he was afraid. He told Tate Masters that the Cherokees owned that land and he would have no part in cutting down the mountain. Besides, Saul had not relished the job of sawing down the redbud trees while they were full of their purple bloom. He didn't tell anybody that he could not bring himself to do it on account of the girl's beauty as well as her goodwill. He thought of her for a week before his mother gave him the perfect excuse to see her again.

Esme packed a basketful of everything that she could think of: loaves of bread, dried apples, jars of molasses, honey, and jelly, beef jerky, crackling for corn bread. She lined the basket with a piece of her treasured linen and brought it to Saul.

“I've studied on it, and it may be that that girl did save him,” she said. She had a hard time admitting that she was wrong, but she always did so when she realized her mistakes. “Take this up there by way of thanks.”

As Saul made his way down the road, he could see Vine standing in the doorway. Only half of her body was visible, and part of her face was lost to the shadows.
Dark
was the only way he could think to describe her to himself. Her eyes were chips of coal; her lips, the color of peach light at dusk.

When Saul climbed down off the horse, Vine moved slowly out of the door. She walked to the gate and did not smile.

“We don't take no charity,” she said loudly, as if she wanted everyone to hear.

“Neither do we,” he said. “That's why I've brung this. This is payment for saving my brother. My mother's sent it.”

“You don't owe me,” Vine said, and snorted a short laugh. “I couldn't let him lay there and die.”

“She wants you to have it. Please.” He held out the basket over the fence. “She'll be insulted if you don't take it.”

She nodded and took the basket in to her mother, who sent back three cakes of soap. Vine handed him the bundle, which her mother had tied up in oilcloth. “Take these.”

Saul grabbed the reins of his horse and began to walk it away from the fence, but Vine threw open the gate and stepped out into the road. She let her hands be buried in the folds of her skirt.

“I thought your people was afraid of me. Said I was able to kill men that come up in here.”

“I've heard tales of that, but I didn't know it was you,” he lied.

She laughed softly. “You believe in such? That somebody can lay curses?”

“Naw, I never did,” he said, and threw his leg up over the horse. He found his place in the saddle and looked down at her. “But the others do. Ever one of them.”

Vine stroked the strong muscles of the horse's hind leg and looked Saul straight in the eye. “You ought to believe,” she said. “I've got plenty of magic about me.”

There is so much writ upon the parchment of leaves,
So much of beauty blown upon the winds,
I can but fold my hands and sink my knees
In the leaf pages.

—James Still, “I Was Born Humble”

T
hose words flew out of my mouth, as sneaky and surprising as little birds that had been waiting behind my teeth to get out. Apparently, they did the trick. I could see my announcement making a fist around his heart. I was so full of myself, so confident. One thing I knowed I could do was charm a man until he couldn't hardly stand it.

I wanted Saul Sullivan, plain and simple. That was all there was to it. I didn't love him—that came later—but I thought that I did. I mistook lust for love, I guess. I knowed that I could fill up some hole that he had inside of himself and hadn't even been aware of until laying eyes on me. Saul looked to me like he needed to lay his head down in somebody's lap and let them run their hand in a circle on his back until he was lulled off to sleep. I knowed that I was the person to do it. I had been waiting a long time for such a feeling to come to me.

That whole summer, I kept one eye on the road as I went about my chores. I throwed corn to the chickens without even watching
them, bent over to pick beans and looked upside down at the road, where I might see his horse come trotting down foamy mouthed and big eyed. At first, when I caught sight of Saul heading down into Redbud Camp, I would turn back to the task at hand and make him think I hadn't seen him coming. He'd have to stop at the gate and yell out for me. I did this just to hear him holler. I loved his full-throated cry: “Vine! Come here to me!” I loved to hear my name on his tongue. But as summer steamed on, I couldn't bring myself to continue such games, and I'd rush out to the road as soon as I seen him coming. I'd throw down the hoe or the bucket of blackberries or whatever I was packing. I'd leave one of my little cousins that I was supposed to be tending to, would rush off the porch even though Mama had ordered me to peel potatoes. The more he come by, the harder it was to stay away from him.

Mama frowned on all of this. Every time I'd get back from being with him, she'd wear a long, dark face and not meet my eyes. “It's not fitting,” she said. “People ought to court their own kind.”

“There ain't no Cherokee boys to court,” I said. “They've left here.”

“Just the same,” Mama said, and dashed water out onto the yard. Her face was square and unmovable. “Them Irish are all drunks.”

I couldn't help but laugh at her, even though I knew this would make her furious. “Good Lord, Mama, that's what they say about Cherokees, too.”

Daddy made no objections. Him and Saul went hunting together and stood around in the yard kicking at the dust while they talked about guns and dogs. Saul brought him quarts of moonshine and sacks of ginseng. We were kin to everybody in Redbud Camp, and when they seen that Daddy had warmed to Saul, they started speaking to me again. Everybody looked up to Daddy, and if he approved of Saul, they felt required to do the same. My aunts Hazel and Zelda and Tressy even seemed to be taken with him. They talked about him while they hung clothes on the line, while they canned kraut in the
shade, when everyone gathered to hear Daddy's hunting tales at dusk.

“Wonder if he's freckled all over,” Hazel whispered. She was much older than me but had been widowed at a young age, and we had always been like sisters. She laughed behind cupped hands. “You know, down there.”

“You don't know, do you, Vine?” Tressy asked, jabbing her elbow into my ribs.

“They say the Irish are akin to horses,” Zelda said, “if you know what I mean.”

I had been around horses enough to know what this meant, so when they all collapsed in laughter, I had to join in.

I couldn't have cared less if they loved him or if they had all hated him and met him at the bridge with snarls and shotguns. I had decided that I was going to have him.

Our courting never took us past the mouth of Redbud. Even though Daddy thought a lot of Saul, he wouldn't allow it. Daddy had said that I was his most precious stone. “I'll let you trail from my fingers, but not be plucked,” Daddy told me one evening when Saul came calling.

I didn't care where we went, as long as he come to see me, but I would have liked to ride off on that fine horse with him a time or two without worrying how far we went. I thought a lot about how it would feel to just slip away, to just wrap my arms around Saul's waist and take off. We never got to do that, though. We always went down to the confluence of Redbud Creek and the Black Banks River. There was a great big rock there, round as an unbaked biscuit. It had a crooked nose that jutted out over the water. This was our spot.

Summer was barely gone before he asked me to marry him. I remember the way the air smelled that day—like blackberries ripe and about to bust on the vines. The sky was without one stain of cloud, and there didn't seem to be a sound besides that of his horse scratching its neck against a scaly-barked hickory and the pretty racket of
the falls. We sat there where we always did, watching the creek fall into the river. The creek was so fast and loud that you couldn't do much talking there. This wall of noise gave us the chance to sit there and study each other. I spent hours looking at the veins in his arms, the calluses on his hands. He had taken a job at the sawmill and this had made his arms firm, his hands much bigger. When we wanted to speak, we'd have to either holler or lean over to each other's ears. It was a good courting place on this account. Any two people can set and jaw all day long, but it takes two people right for each other to set together and just be quiet. And it's good to have to talk close to somebody's ear. Sometimes when he did this, his hot breath would send a shudder all through me.

That day, he run his rough hand down the whole length of my hair and smoothed the ends out onto the rock behind me. I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of him touching me in such a way. I have always believed that somebody touching your head is a sign of love, and his doing so got to me so badly that I felt like crying out. It seemed better to me than if he had leaned me back onto the rock and set into kissing. I knowed exactly how cool my hair was beneath his fingers, how his big palm could have fit my head just like a cap if he had taken the notion to position it in such a way, and I closed my eyes.

The closer it got to dark, the louder the water seemed to be. The sky was red at the horizon, and the moon drifted like a white melon rind in the purple sky opposite.

“Vine?” I heard him yell.

I turned to face him. “What?”

“We ought to just get married,” he hollered.

I nodded. “Well,” I mouthed. I didn't want to scream out my acceptance, but I sure felt like it. I turned back to the creek and was aware of my shoulders arching up in the smile that just about cut my face in half.