Cold Sassy Tree (24 page)

Then I stated my business, namely, that Papa wanted him to let me use Big Red and Satan and the covered wagon. "Some of us boys are go'n go campin'."

Grandpa banged on the arm of his rocking chair. "What you arter be doin' instead, you arter be studyin' the catechism and the Bible. Ain't thet right, Lias? You ever see sech a smart-aleck boy?"

Coming up the porch steps, Mr. Lias grinned and said I was smart-aleck, all right. "But he ain't a bad boy, Mr. Tweedy."

"Then he must a-changed here lately."

Real respectful, I asked, "Is it all right for us to take the team and the wagon, sir? Papa said you might could spare'm."

"I need them mules." It was like he'd forgot Papa was the one that bought Big Red and Satan in the first place. "I need them and the wagon, both. You know good'n' well we use thet wagon ever fourth Sunday to go to Hebron for preachin'."

"We'll be back long fore time for Hebron, Grandpa."

"Well, anyhow, hit ain't all right with me. What y'all go'n go campin' for? Why cain't you jest lay out in some a-them woods around Cold Sassy a few days, or come out here?"

"Time for dinner, y'all," Mrs. Jones called from the door. "How you do, Will? Who's your young friend?"

She was a huge fat woman, Grandpa Tweedy's third wife, and I liked her. The reason she was still Mrs. Jones, Grandpa had called her that all the time they were courting—her being a widow woman—and after they got married he was too lazy to bother changing her name. Granny Blakeslee used to laugh about that, and she thought it worth mentioning that Mrs. Jones had kicked Mr. Jones after he was dead. Of course, Mrs. Jones hadn't known he was dead. She just thought he was snoring again. Doc said the snore was the breath going out for the last time.

As we started in to dinner, Grandpa Tweedy walked over to the edge of the porch and picked up a conch shell off the banister rail. "I ordered this'n from Savannah," he told Pink, and blew a loud blast. "Thet's to call the hands to dinner," he explained.

We had just sat down to the table when a rumble of colored men's voices suddenly drifted in from the kitchen. It was the field hands, coming in to eat. "Miz Jones, reach back of you and shet the kitchen door," said Grandpa Tweedy. "Now, Willy. Hit jest makes me nervous, the idee a-you takin' off in thet big wagon. And shore as sin, if it ain't here we'll need it."

I knew he meant somebody might die. The covered wagon was the hearse for anybody who needed one in that part of Banks County. General Tweedy had taken his last ride in it nearly forty years before, to the Hebron graveyard. His widow, Arminda, my great-grandmother, had gone in it to the same place just a year ago, and also when she died the first time.

Before Grandpa Tweedy could say any more about the wagon, Mr. Lias said, "Y'all heard bout Will's other granddaddy gittin' marrit last week?"

"Is thet a fact," said Grandpa, helping his plate. "Seems like it wadn't more'n a week or two ago, Lias, you come in with a message from Hoyt sayin' Miss Mattie Lou had died. Rucker shore acks fast."

Mrs. Jones wanted to know who was the bride, who married them, and all about it. Then she asked, "Will, is they any more room in Mr. Blakeslee's cemetery plot? Besides for him, I mean? You reckon they's room for this Miss Love in there with him and Miss Mattie Lou?"

"Yes'm," I said, embarrassed. "I think so."

Grandpa Tweedy grinned. "Miz Jones worries bout where I'm go'n put her down when the time comes, son. Hit bein' the custom, I got to be buried twixt yore daddy's mama, Will, and Miss Flo. But Miz Jones don't want to be put at our feet, which is the only other space left."

"That's all right, Mr. Tweedy, I fine'ly figgered out a plan," she said, laughing merrily. "Want to hear?"

He looked up, suspicious. "Say it."

"I've decided I want to be put down settin' up. Settin' in a rockin' cheer with a whole choc'late cake in my lap and a silver fork to eat it with. And naturally it's go'n take a heap a-room, me bein' a fairly large woman."

"Ain't no way to bury somebody settin' up in no rockin' cheer."

"Lemme finish now. Since they ain't that much room in yore lot, I just think I'll set beside Mr. Jones through eternity. I'm go'n ast the fam'ly when we go to Hebron next fourth Sunday."

It really made Grandpa Tweedy mad. He didn't say another word the whole meal, not even when the cook and Mrs. Jones were clearing the table. But a gleam came in his eye while he was spooning a mound of whip cream on his blackberry cobbler, and he started telling about when he was a boy and went to the mountains with his daddy, General Tweedy. "We was ridin' horseback, buyin' up cattle. Camped up there in the Blue Ridge for a week or more, gittin' maybe two-three cows from one farmer and six or seven from another. We drove home thirty-five head, just me and him. Son, you ain't never seen anythang pretty as them big blue Georgie mountains!"

The upshot of this remembering was that my grandfather not only went with us to the pasture and watched us catch Big Red and Satan, but got two of his field hands to come help us load the wagon bed with corn, oats, and hay. And all he said as we hitched up was "Y'all be good now. And come Sunday, find you a Presbyterian church to go to. You hear me?" I turned the team into the road, T.R. riding high on the seat between me and Pink.

"Y'all take good care them mules, Will!" Grandpa Tweedy hollered after us. "They's a matched pair and I'll be in a fix if'n anythang happens to'm! Be careful, hear."

"Yessir," I called back as the team broke into a trot. "Don't worry, Grandpa, I know all about handlin' mules!"

E
IGHT YEARS
after our camping trip, I still can't believe how good I told that tale about Aunt Loma nursing a pig, not to mention the one about sticking a pin in her rubber busts.

Five of us boys went to the mountains: Pink, Lee Roy, Smiley, myself, and—at the last minute—Dunson McCall. His daddy, the school superintendent, had a two-horse farm near town and bought a lot of seed and fertilizer at the store, so Papa thought it would be "a nice thing to do" to invite Dunson along.

Dunse kept his nose in a book all the time and couldn't hit a baseball if you hung it on a string in front of his bat. And as the saying goes, he was a lost ball in high weeds when it came to hunting and fishing. But he was all right. We didn't mind having him.

Grandpa Blakeslee's house was on our way out of Cold Sassy. As we rolled past it, Smiley snickered and said, "How you like your new two-timin' grandma, Will?"

I raised the whip and said shut up. "If you got to talk like that, you just get out and go on back home. You and anybody else that thinks she's any of their business." I glared at the whole bunch of them.

By time we got out in the country, we were having a high old time, whooping, talking loud, and all like that. If we saw a creakity wagon up ahead full of country folks going to town, I'd cluck the mules to a smart trot and we'd all wave as we passed them. We knew the big blue-painted covered wagon was something to stare at, and five boys off for the mountains were something to envy.

I began to forget all about Miss Love and what Cold Sassy must be saying about her kissing another man two days after promising to cleave only unto Grandpa. I even forgot to hope she knew it was Miss Effie Belle that told on her and not me.

Our mothers had packed baskets of food to keep us going. Fried chicken and boiled ham, baked sweet potatoes, peach pickles, big buttermilk biscuits, cookies, cakes, apples, boiled eggs, I don't know what all. We traveled thirty miles that first day and never stopped eating. About two o'clock the second day, just past the little town of Clayton in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we took an old logging road into the woods and picked out a site near a little branch. While I fed and watered the mules and staked them out under some trees, the other fellers made camp. We didn't know whose land it was, of course. Just so you didn't set the woods afire and weren't Gypsies, nobody minded. You didn't have to ask.

Though we counted on getting plenty of fish and wild game, we had a wooden grub box full of staples. Smoked ham, bacon, a bucket of salt mackerel, flour, cornmeal, grits, raw sweet potatoes, lard, coffee, a tin of butter, some store bread, and a can of beaten biscuits that Dunse's mama made.

That night we put the box out under a tree to make more room for us to sleep in the wagon. I'd barely closed my eyes good when T.R. went to growling and the mules commenced raring up and squealing. Boy howdy, we scrambled out quick to grab those mules. If they'd pulled up their stakes and run away, I'd never of heard the last of it from Grandpa Tweedy.

What happened, two great big black bears had busted into our grub box. We could see them in the moonlight, eating the ham and those raw sweet potatoes, breaking open cans, scattering coffee and meal—having just the best time you ever saw. Acted like we weren't even there.

Smiley got his gun and was fixing to take aim when I stopped him. "How you think we go'n hold the mules if you go to shoot-in'? These ain't huntin' mules." He raised the gun anyhow. "I'm tellin' you, Smiley! I rather be hungry than walk home!"

You talk about hungry, there's nothing like knowing your grub is off somewhere digesting in a bear to make you feel starved to death. At daybreak we scavenged in the wreckage of the box, but what hadn't been eaten was mashed into the wet pine needles. All we found was a little damp flour in the bottom of a busted can.

In the gloomy, misty, gray morning we grazed on blackberries. That was breakfast. We had blackberries again for dinner. Supper was a boiled goose that Smiley shot on a nearby pond after the sun came out. We had to skin him to get the feathers off, and he was tough, great goodness, despite we boiled him and boiled him and boiled him. But he made a meal, and we thought to skim the goose grease off the top of the water. Used it next morning to fry a few middling-size trout.

We ate blackberries off and on all that second morning, which was cold and damp and overcast. I managed to shoot a dove and a rabbit—not much for five boys—and at noon we roasted them on a spit over the fire. We'd just finished eating when the rain that had threatened all morning blew in over the mountains in heavy black thunderheads. We barely had time to string up some canvas over the mules before the storm hit.

Safe in the wagon, we had a fine time for a while, tussling in the hay and talking about girls and all. But as the day wore on with no let-up of rain, we started getting hungry and cold and miserable. We got even more miserable when Lee Roy noticed that Smiley had left our box of shotgun shells out under a tree. Wet shells meant the end of hunting anything except blackberries and dry wood, which we hadn't thought to collect any real supply of.

I was really mad at Smiley. Bluford Jackson wouldn't of been careless about the shotgun shells or the grub box, either. And he'd of thought to gather piles of wood when we first got there, instead of keeping just enough ahead for the next campfire. I groaned. My throat swelled and ached. Bluford Jackson was six feet under, and the camping trip he planned was deader than him.

Trying to put some life in the party, so to speak, I sat up and said, "Dunse, I don't think you've heard how my Uncle Johnny hung a cow by mistake."

"Aw, shut up, Will," said Lee Roy. "Dunse's heard it. We all done heard it. A million times." He found a blanket and started pulling hay over himself for warmth as the sky got darker. We sat some more, watching the rain drip off the back canvas. When it started down in sheets, I said, "Why don't I tell about Raw Head and Bloody Bones?"

"How about shut up, Will?" said Smiley. "We get tired of your damn stories."

"Don't you cuss me, dernit!"

"Well, shut up then."

There wasn't room in the wagon for a fight. "One time my daddy saw his ancestor who'd been dead a hundred years," I said, stubborn. There was a slight stir of interest.

Pink thought I meant Papa saw his ancestor's ghost.

"Naw, I mean he saw his actual great-great-dead-granddaddy. He was in a brick crypt in a old church graveyard up in North Ca'lina. When Papa and a cousin of his went over to check on the crypt, so much ivy had grown in through the cracks, you couldn't tell if the vines were holding the bricks together or pushing them apart. So they went in, and there was their great-great grand-daddy. The coffin had rotted to pieces and his bones were just layin' there. Papa said the skull had a hatchet cut on the forehead."

"Goll-ee," Pink whispered.

"That ain't all. A little-girl skeleton was in the crypt, too, in a coffin with a glass top. Her bones were just so white and pretty—"

"How'd your daddy know it was a girl?" asked Smiley, suspicions I had made up more of it than I really had.

"The bones had on a little white poky-dot dress that hadn't all rotted yet, that's how."

The drumming of rain on the canvas was easing up, which was a good thing; it had started to drip through on us. But I hardly noticed. Like an actor whose audience has stood up to clap, I didn't want to quit. And now I knew what bait to use.

I said, "I've told y'all bout Great-Granmaw Tweedy dyin' twice. The first time, you remember, she jumped out of the coffin just fore they were fixin' to nail the lid. The second time she stayed dead. But what I thought might inner-rest y'all right now, she rode to the Hebron cemetery both times in this very wagon." I knocked on the side of it. The hollow wooden sound like to busted Pink and Lee Roy clear out of the hay.

"Did you see her die, Will—either time?" Dunse asked in a hushed voice.

"Naw. But last summer they'd just pulled the sheet over her head when me and my fam'ly got out home. And I went in there where she was at."

Smiley gasped. "I wouldn't a-gone in there," he admitted.

"Me neither," said Dunse. "I never been that close to a dead person."

"A old colored woman was sittin' with the body. She said, 'Want to see yo granny, boy?' I shook my head, but she said, 'Miss Mindy ain' gwine hurt you,' and she pulled that sheet back. Granmaw was propped up on pillows. What little hair she had was damp and standin' out like a scairt cat's. Her mouth had dropped open and her eyes stared straight at me. I could a-kilt that nigger woman, showin' off like that, tryin' to scare me. I backed out of that room, I tell you.