A Parchment of Leaves (6 page)

We had packed the kitchen table outside for the food and spread three or four quilts out for people to eat on, too. There were people all over that yard eating as hard as they could, and it was almost like being back on Redbud, what with them all laughing and cutting up. My people hadn't come, even though Saul had gone over there and personally invited them. One of Mama's sisters was in the midst of a hard labor, so none of them felt it would have been right to leave.

I couldn't eat after cooking all day, so I just set there and looked at everybody. I knowed all of them well by this time. They were
people that lived the next little place up the river, men that worked at the mill with Saul, boys who went to church with Esme. Their wives and children came, some of those women who had helped in the house-raising, too. I wanted to remember all of the people that helped build our home. I memorized them all like that, setting on the ground eating and laughing, drinking lemonade out of jars. It was late October by this time, but it turned out to be bright that day. The sun lit up the yellow leaves like colored glass. We had spread out the quilts close to the fire, so nobody got cold, even when the holler grew dark.

When everybody had eat, one of the men pulled out a jar of homemade wine, and when it was clear Esme wasn't going to throw a fit, a few more made it known that they had brought liquor. They had bottles of whiskey from town and jugs of moonshine that had been made up in the hollers.

Esme smiled, dusted off the skirt of her dress, and stood from her stiff chair. “Well, I don't have a bit of interest in seeing a bunch of fools get drunk,” she said. “I guess I'll head up to the house.”

I didn't ask her to stay, because I knowed she wouldn't anyway. “Night,” I said, and kissed her cheek. “I won't let Aaron get too drunk.”

“Never mind Aaron. You can't keep that sot from drinking,” she said. “But Saul's got a tongue for liquor, too. It's him I'd watch.”

I had never even seen Saul take a drink before and suddenly realized that I had only been married to this man three months and that I really didn't know him at all. Every day it seemed I learned something new about him: the way he took his coffee, the songs he whistled while he piddled around the house, the size of his shoes. I had never even entertained the notion of him liking to drink. Maybe it was true what they said about the Irish.

The men really set into drinking once they spied Esme walking up the road. It seemed that mason jars and bottles appeared right out of the ground. A man by the name of Moseley—one who had helped
raise the rafters on our house—run down the creek to where his car was parked at the mouth of the holler and come back with his fiddle. He started sawing away on it as he walked up the creek bed, and the horses standing there scratched at the ground and flicked their ears at the sound. It was pleasing to hear that sound coming up out of the darkness as he walked through the shoals. Another man had a guitar. Aaron brought down his banjo, which he usually just sat around and strummed upon as if he really didn't know a song to get all the way through. But this night his fingers flew across the strings like possessed things, picking out fast, wild music that I couldn't help but pat my foot to. He hunched himself down—as if hugging the banjo to him—so that we couldn't see anything but the top of his head and his shoulders moving to the beat.

I imagined the music drifting over the creek like mist on an autumn evening, spreading itself out with its high notes pressed tight against the mountains. I felt like a bird had been let loose beneath my ribs. Everybody was clapping to the music or stomping their feet, and some of them were even up and clogging. I had not been so happy since leaving Redbud. Being amongst that music and the people hollering to one another, touching one another on the shoulder while they talked, drinking from the same jar of moonshine—all that made me feel at home at last, somehow.

Saul handed me the jar of shine and told me to pass it to a man nearby. I stuck it under my nose and drawed its sweet bitterness up into myself. I shook my head. It smelled so strong, but my mouth watered to taste it, too.

“Take ye a sup of it,” Saul said. I could tell he was already feeling good, for his voice possessed a laughing lilt to it that I had never thought he could manage.

I did. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back, and took a good gulp of that moonshine. When I brought the jar down, I was breathing fire, and somebody shoved a jar of sauerkraut into my hands and told me to eat it right quick so I wouldn't get sick.

“Lordy mercy,” I said, when I could catch my breath, and everybody laughed and slapped their knees. I never had tasted no liquor before in my life, and I feared that my mother would find out about this and come huffing up the road to wear me out with a switch.

“The trick is to hold your breath,” Saul said. “That way you don't taste it.”

“What's the use drinking something if you don't like the taste of it?” I said, and they all laughed wildly again, some of them slapping one another on the back.

Saul kept taking swigs from the jar, but he wasn't being loud or mean, like some men I knowed. My daddy used to get like that, way back. He would drink until he got outright cruel, and Mama would lock him out of the house. Once he took an ax and chopped the door down, then just fell into the bed and passed out. But Saul wasn't like this at all. He just seemed like a more happy version of himself. His face looked distorted by his permanent smile, strange because he never let his eyes show what he felt. This was something I liked about him, although I couldn't say why, and looking at him now—drunker than a dog, his face cut in two by that grin—I was disgusted by him and delighted at the same time. This has always been my problem in life—I feel too much all at once.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Drink you some more of it.” He looked dead at me, as if this were a secret we were sharing. I looked around at the crowd. Not one other woman was drinking. Although my daddy and uncles got drunk at least twice a month, my mother and aunts had always just set and talked or gone about their work while the men had their big time. I didn't care. I tipped up the jar again. And again. And each time it got a little easier to swallow, although I never refused the salvation of that sauerkraut. Whoever had canned the kraut had put the core of the cabbage down into it, and Saul took that and dropped it into a jar of moonshine. I was setting on Saul's lap by now, and he kept one big hand on the small of my back.

“Look there,” he told the boys, holding the jar up like a lantern.
“We'll give it an hour to soak up that shine, and one of you all can eat that.”

“What will it do?” I asked.

“Make you wilder than hell, that's what,” Saul said. I had never heard him talk so much since I had knowed him.

The musicians started in on a whirling, stomping song that set my feet to patting until I couldn't hardly stand it. I didn't feel at all as I had expected to when drunk. I wasn't dizzy or loud, or any of the things my cousins had said liquor made a person be. It was just that everything seemed heightened to me. Laughter from across the yard was high and sharp, like a pinprick on the darkness. When night smoothed itself out over us, the stars showed up in the sky like lights being turned on, one by one. I felt I had never seen it in this way before. The music sounded different, as if each note could be heard on its own. It seemed I could feel the blood running through all of my veins. Before long, the music got to me so bad that I began to move around on Saul's lap, stomping my foot and swaying my hips as I sat there.

I jumped off Saul's knees and pulled at his arm. “Dance with me,” I said.

“Lord have mercy, woman, you've lost your mind,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I couldn't dance to save my life.”

“Come on, Saul. Clog with me.”

“Get Aaron to. He can outdance the devil.”

“He's playing the banjo, though.”

Dave Conley leaned over. “I can take over that banjo,” he said. There was much guffawing, as he was known to always ask for the banjo when he got to drinking, although he couldn't do much more that pluck at the strings. Aaron jumped down from the porch and started clogging out in the middle of the circle of people. His arms hung limply at his sides, as they were supposed to do, but every other part of his body seemed to be moving, matching the music. That boy could dance. He knowed just when to throw his knee high, when to
tap his toe. His feet touched the earth in perfect rhythm with the music. He finally held his hand out for me.

“Go on,” Saul hollered. “Show em what you're made of.”

I took both of Aaron's hands. We held our arms straight out in front of us so that we were very far apart, and we started to clog. He let go of my hand on the exact right note, and then we really set in to dancing. The music ran through me, churning and pumping. We were both awful good, I have to say, but in very different ways. He had learned clogging in the fashion of the Irish, and I had learned it by watching my mother, whose Indian stomp dances had been flavored by flat-out clogging. Somehow this worked to our favor, and we matched step for step. On every move I made, he met me in perfect stride. We danced so good together that it must have looked like we had rehearsed it. I could feel everybody watching us, clapping, the circle of people a blur of teeth in smiling faces. The music ran up and down my legs, flew around me, lifted my arms and my legs. I felt like I was celebrating the birth of the world.

The pickers played harder and harder, and Aaron and me started to rush in a circle around the yard, looking each other in the eye. I couldn't help but laugh, although Aaron held a straight face. His eyes were so serious that I felt I ought to look away.

When the music swelled until it seemed it would bust wide open, Aaron took my hands once again and we held on to each other, moving round and round so quick that I couldn't make out anything but his face. I caught his eye and for a minute it felt like he was looking deeper into me than Saul ever had. I felt like he could read my mind. I felt naked. It struck me as not being right, how he was looking at me. Even his hands seemed abnormally hot, as if he had held them over a licking fire. The ends of my own fingers tingled within his palms. Just when I was about to jerk away, the music stopped. Everybody jumped up and clapped like we were just back from a war. They whistled and hollered, held their glasses and bottles and jars high in the air.

My chest heaved. I was so out of breath that I didn't think I could make it back to my place on Saul's lap, and I fell right back on a quilt, made damp by dew, breathing hard. When I finally gathered myself back together, I set up, leaning back on my hands, and tried to shake away the feeling. It was just the moonshine, I figured.

A woman come out of the crowd into the middle of the circle. There were so many people there that I had not noticed her before, but my eyes fell so straight upon her that I felt I was meant to be seeing her. She looked different from the women on God's Creek, more like my aunts and the women I had knowed growing up. She held herself in a proud way, her legs planted firmly on the ground.

She was saying something low and breathy to the fiddler, so I knowed she was about to sing for us.

“Sing ‘Long Journey Home,' Serena!” a man called out.

I had heard tell of her, of course. Her man, Whistle-Dick, worked with Saul, and they lived on the next creek over from us, but she had been gone ever since I had come to God's Creek. She had been gone way over to Pineville, setting beside her mother's deathbed. She had been home a week, but I hadn't even had the time to go down and speak to her, what with the house-raising. “That gal's a crackerjack,” Saul had said, but I hadn't thought much about it.

I spoke her name to myself. She was named just right, as her face was so smooth and clean that it looked as if she had just dashed two handfuls of ice water onto it. Her eyes were wide, so that she seemed to be taking in every single thing with cool concentration. She was a big-boned woman, but in that curvy way that men like. She was solid as a beech tree, with hands that looked as if they knowed how to do things. She held her shoulders square, her chin high.

Whistle-Dick was drunker than anybody there. Falling-down drunk, and by dark he had passed out right on the porch floor. Now, most women would have either got mad and took off home by theirself or went over there and tried to tend to their man, making sure he wasn't about to get sick. But Serena just got up to sing.

Everybody was calling out different songs for her to sing while Aaron tried to tune his banjo.

She smiled at the crowd and spoke in a strong voice. “You all just hush now,” she said. “I believe I'll do ‘The Two Sisters.'”

That was a song about a girl who drowns her own sister out of jealousy. I never had liked that song, since it was one of those that repeated the same verse over and over, but this time it was altogether different. Serena had the clearest and most perfect voice that I had ever heard in my life. She must have had a whippoorwill's soul because she sung just as pretty and mournful as they did. She closed her eyes and held her face skyward, and a wrinkle come to her brow at some verses, making me believe that she felt every painful word of that song, like somehow she was connected to what happened in it. She sung:

She pushed her a little further from shore,
Bow down.

Pushed her a little further from shore,
Bow and bend to me.

She bent and pushed her out from the shore,

All for the sake of the hat that she wore.

I savored her voice the way I had once clenched my mouth tight to lock in the taste of my mama's coffee. The whole yard was quiet. I closed my eyes and felt the words make goose bumps run up the backs of my arms.

The miller was hanged for his deadly sin,
Bow down.

The miller was hanged for his deadly sin,
Bow and bend to me.