A Parchment of Leaves (24 page)

Aidia was out in the middle of the dance space. A waltz had been called so that the pie couples could dance. Aidia had latched onto somebody, too. She was dancing with a tall, good-looking man who
I recognized right away. I pulled at Serena's sleeve and motioned for her to look, too.

“Lord, that's Dalton,” she said around her cigarette. “I ain't seen him in a coon's age.”

Serena could not even bear to speak Whistle-Dick's name, but she bore no ill will toward his brother. He had offered her some money to get by on after she run Whistle-Dick off. The last she had heard, Dalton had took off to Harlan County to work in the mines.

Aidia waltzed with Dalton like someone who has spent every day of her life dancing. She held her back straight and her head high. She leaned back and laughed. She held on tightly to his hand and did not flinch when he put his hand too low on her back. I felt like storming through the crowd to grab her and drag her from the dance floor. She was flirting with him—Looking him right in the eye, hanging on every word he whispered into her ear.

I moved through the crowd with Serena close behind. As they walked back off the dancing space, Aidia hooked her arm through Dalton's. Serena come up quickly behind them and laid a big hand on Dalton's back, squeezing the meaty part between his neck and shoulder. He spun around, and Serena broke out in a high laugh. He put his long arms around her and hugged her.

Another dance had been called and the fiddler was sawing away. “Let's go outside, where we can talk!” Dalton hollered over the music.

It was much colder outside now. A frost had fallen and our feet crunched through it. On our way out, I had jerked somebody's mackinaw off the coat tree and put it over Matracia, making her twice as heavy. Aidia broke away from Dalton while he talked to Serena. She run up and ran her hand down Matracia's back. “Oh, it's went to sleep,” she said. Then she hugged me tightly, laying her face against mine.

“Thank you so much for coming with me,” she said. Her breath played against my face. “I'm having the biggest time ever was.”

I pulled away from her. “You've been drinking.”

“Me and Dalton stepped outside and had a sup to warm us up.” She raised her eyebrows.

“You're going to be the talk of the country. A married woman acting thisaway.”

The smile fell from her lips. “Do you think I care what these people think? You never have. Why should I?”

“Aidia, think of your baby.” My breath spread out between us. I tried to talk quietly, as I didn't want Dalton to overhear. He and Serena were in deep conversation about old times. “You're drinking and flirting. Let's go to the house, now.”

“Why should I?” she said. Her mouth was a little red pout. She crossed her arms and hugged herself against the cold. “He's dead. You know it as well as I do.”

“Why would you say such a thing?” I said. I felt as if she had hit me in the stomach.

“I can see it in your eyes when I talk about him. You know it all through you, but you don't want to tell me. You don't want to make it real for me.”

I looked away from her. I knowed now why I didn't want her dancing and carrying on. If I was witness to that, I had to admit that Aaron was dead. And even though I thought of it all the time, I still tried to deny it, too.

“Please don't be mad at me,” she said, and laid a warm hand against my face. “I just want to live, Vine. You know what that feels like.”

I patted Matracia's back and bounced her up and down a little. I thought Aidia would at least want to hold her, but she slipped back beside Dalton, looking up at him like a moony-eyed girl. He had pulled a pint bottle out of his pocket and handed it to Serena. She threw her head back and took a quick drink.

Serena held the bottle out for me. “Here, this'll warm you up.”

I shook my head. “We better be getting on back to the house, Serena. Before it gets any colder.”

“It's cold as it's getting,” Serena said. She shook the bottle in front of my face, and the liquor bubbled inside.

“Go on,” Aidia said with a little laugh. “Let me take Matracia. You need to have a little fun, too.”

So I did take a drink. I felt bad for doing it, what with Birdie right inside the schoolhouse and all, but it felt good to me, sliding down my throat. It felt like hot salvation that would flow into my veins and spread out across my body. I handed it back, and Dalton smiled at me with teeth so white they fairly glowed in the darkness. I wanted to drink more of it. I wanted to hold my skirts up and dance and be the talk of the town, too. But there would be no real celebrating for me until I seen Saul's face again, until I accepted what I was or was not going to tell him.

M
e and Esme chose a morning just before Thanksgiving to gather up our greenery. As soon as it got daylight, I took Birdie up to Aidia's and then went down to Esme's to wait for the day to settle in good. Every year we went up on the mountain to find things like mistletoe and holly and mountain laurel. We kept some for ourselves, to use at Christmas, but we took most of it to Sam Mullins's store in Black Banks, where we could sell it for good money. Sam Mullins shipped it by train to places like Philadelphia and Boston, where rich people bought it to decorate their fine houses. It amazed me to think of the branches of our trees being shipped off that far, seeing a world that we would never know.

Esme was on the porch, running the butcher knife over a whetstone. She knowed how to work with a knife; each time, the stone bit into the blade at the perfect angle. A fine dust of little metal shavings laid in a line across her apron. She was wearing Aaron's coat. The November morning was bitter, but Esme liked to sit outside in the fall of the year. She said autumn air was good for her lungs.

Esme glanced up quick and said, “Hidy,” before looking back to the knife. She touched the blade with the tip of her finger and laid it aside. She fished her pocketknife out of her apron and began to sharpen it, too. “Going to be a clear day,” she said.

“It sure looks it,” I said, and looked again at the butcher knife laying on the table. It made my stomach turn over. “Got all your knives sharp?”

“Yeah, after this one, I'll be done,” Esme said. “They's coffee on the warmer plate. Bring me a little sup, too.”

Esme's kitchen smelled like lard and flour. The coal stove fairly glowed with heat, as Esme loved a hot house. I usually suffered sweat and closeness while visiting Esme during cold weather, as I was hot-natured anyway. Esme kept a fire right up into the spring and built them on rainy summer nights, too. I poured the coffee out into the dainty teacups that looked so out-of-place in her kitchen. I wondered where they had come from.

“Here ye go,” I said. She had finished her sharpening and was sitting with her head propped back against the wall of the house, her eyes closed. Her glasses laid atop the folds of her dress. She jumped as if startled, then smiled at her own fright and put both hands out for the cup. I laughed. “You didn't nod off, did you?”

“Naw, I's resting my eyes. I'm going to have to get me some new specs,” Esme said, wiping her glasses with her apron. “I keep a headache anymore.”

The coffee was so hot it burned my tongue, but I sipped at it anyway. I could feel its warmth spreading out over my whole body. I eyed a dying moon just over the mountain—no more than a silver scratch on the morning sky. It was very quiet and we listened to the creek bustling along. On Redbud, the creek had not been so close, and when I first come to God's Creek, I had thought the sound of rushing water all night long would drive me crazy. Now I could not imagine laying down to sleep without hearing that gentle roar. Sometimes I woke up from nightmares and was assured that time had not
stopped when I heard the creek slipping over the old rocks. That sound was a part of me now. It was funny how I was always aware of it, too. Usually when things are constantly present, you don't even notice them, the way you will get used to the smell of your own home and not even catch that scent anymore. But I always heard the creek. It was like a song.

“That old creek's a pretty sound, but lonesome, too,” Esme said, just as if she had been reading my own thoughts. “When I first come here, I thought this was the lonesomest old place that ever was. I thought I'd never make it.”

My laugh was short and sudden on the quiet. “I know. Me, too.”

“I was raised on the other side of Cumberland Gap, you know. In Tennessee. Once through the gap, it spreads out in a big valley. The awfullest big valley you ever seen. The mountains was like a big wall on one side of our farm, but beyond that, it was just fields, full of flowers and gardens. They was so much room to run. Our creek was slow-moving, over limestone, no big rocks to make sound. You could wade in it for miles. When Willem brought me here, this was like a whole new country to me.”

“Saul never says much about him,” I said. I had barely heard Saul mention his daddy.

“Nothing much to tell. He was a quiet man, like Saul. Stayed gone a lot when Saul was little. But he could be mean. He was rough on them boys, believed in hard work. Rougher on Aaron, though, and him just a little feller. Willem died when Aaron wasn't but five year old.”

“So Saul was his pick?”

“I couldn't say that,” Esme said. She pulled her coat together and latched the top button. “He was just harder on Aaron. I guess that's why I petted him so much. I always felt so sorry for him. He was a pitiful little child, trailing along after Willem, wanting to be made over.”

I hated picturing Aaron as a child, for it made me aware that he
had once been innocent, a baby like Birdie or Luke or Matracia. Thinking of him as a child made it that much harder. I couldn't hardly stand to hear Esme say his name; she spoke it with a lilt that churned in my gut.

Esme leaned forward and reached her hand out over the space between our chairs, then put her hand atop mine. I looked at her hand for a long time, so small and soft in spite of all the work it had seen. Then I looked at Esme, who seemed altogether different to me. She had aged so much in the last year, as if she was shrinking into herself. Her hair was thinner and blew in wild wisps around her face. Her eyes were losing their blue. The lines in her forehead had gotten deeper. I had a sudden thought:
Esme is sick with grief.

“They's something I want to tell you,” Esme said, leaning forward. “Not even Saul knows it.”

I waited, aware that I was taking short little breaths.

“Aaron hain't mine. I never bore him.”

I brought the cup down from my lips and set it upon my upturned palm. I don't believe I had ever been so surprised before in my life. But I just waited for Esme to go on.

“I knowed for a while that Willem was fooling with this gal over on Pushback Gap. She was the talk of the country. Her man had run off and left her with a big slew of younguns and without a dime. She didn't have no way of making it, couldn't tend a garden or do her a thing with all them children to see to. Men went over there all the time, and she had another baby after her man had done left. People talked about her a sight, called her the whore of Pushback Gap. They said she took money or things, see. I never had laid eyes on her, but I sure heard tell of her.”

“Surely not,” I said.

Esme took her hand away and looked at it as she talked. “One morning, here she come. Packing a little baby. I'd heard enough about her to know who she was. The prettiest woman you ever seen, all dressed up. Had a big silk bow on the blouse of her dress. But
right nasty-looking. Wild black hair, yellow-skinned the way people gets from not being clean. I was setting right here. Right here in this spot, drinking me a cup of coffee just like now. Willem was down there bout where your-all's house stands now, clearing out a place for cane.”

I looked down the path to where our house was, as if I might be able to see them, but all was lost to the shadows of approaching day.

“I could tell by the way they was talking to each other. I knowed sure as my name was Esme what had passed between them. When a man and a woman argues, they's something's happened with them. She tried to give the baby to him, but he wouldn't offer his arm for it. He turned his back to her, went right back to chopping with his hoe. I just set here, watching them. Never even got up out my chair. She kept on hollering. I couldn't really hear her, but I knowed what she was saying. It was plain by the way she stood. And finally she just laid the baby right down on the ground, down there by that rock in your yard. She leaned down over it a minute, like she was having a second thought, then she took off. She run right down the creek. I could see her dress tail turning dark with water.”

I wanted to say,
Don't.
This word rested on my tongue, but I did not spit it out. I didn't want to be the only one to know this.

“Willem kept right on hoeing, hitting that ground like it might open up and swallow him if he tried long enough. I don't know if he knowed that baby was laying there or not, but he bound to have. I don't see how he couldn't feel it behind him. So I dashed out my coffee and went down there. I knowed then that I hated him and never would do nothing but that again. To see him with his back to that child laying on the ground. It eat me up.”

“Esme,” I said—a lost breath, since Esme paid me no mind.

“I bent down and gathered it up. Little thing, no more than two months old. Prettiest baby you ever seen in your life. Full head of black hair, and all eyes, to boot. Big blue eyes. Wasn't even crying. Just laying there content as could be, and that hurt me worse than
anything, seeing how a child just has to take whatever's doled out to it. Willem turned around then and asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him that I couldn't set and watch a little child be left behind and that I knowed it was his. He never denied it, and he didn't have to. ‘Did you not pay her what she was owed?' I said, and that was the first time he ever drawed his fist back on me. He never had hit me. I stood there feeling bigger than him. ‘You know better,' I said.