Milkweed Ladies (4 page)

 

Oh, the black and the bay and the dapple gray

And all the pretty little horses.

 

Sometimes her cracked voice would get to running over and over in my head, and in years after, whenever I thought of Granny Fanny, her song would come back to me like the crackle of thorns in the hearthfire.

Grandma Susan would sing in church: “On Jordan's stormy banks I stand,” or “Rock of ages cleft for me”; but Granny Fanny would not go to church, nor to prayer meetings, nor to the pie suppers down at school. The only place she would go was to trade and barter. She would “take her foot in her hand,” she said, and whip down over the hill to sell her butter pats or jars of apple butter. She would trade her goods for sugar and coffee and tobacco, for she was still smoking her old corncob pipe, and would carry her store things back home in her sack. If she got cash money, she would put it in her long black leather purse, then stick it under her bed tick to be safe and sound. Granny had never heard of the Protestant Ethic; she was just an uneducated old woman who hadn't learned the evils of working and saving, and she wanted no foolish things—only coffee and tobacco, and her mantel clock with the gargoyles staring out above its face. The only time she ever spent money “foolishly” was the time she went to White Sulphur, a journey of some forty miles, to attend the reunion of Confederate veterans—a trip that was always spoken of in the household as though Granny Fanny had gone to farthest Spain.

White Sulphur was where the Old South had once curtsied on the Greenbrier piazzas,
and where the Rebels and Yankees had fought along the road in the desperate August days of 1863. Granny Fanny had helped with the wounded there, and there she first met Grandpa Jim, the old Captain. In 1913, at the reunion, she heard the drums beating again and saw the “Stars and Bars” floating there.

To Granny Fanny, and to all of us in 1913, Captain Jim's war was still “The War.” “Back in time of The War,” Granny would say; and the Captain's bills of Confederate money were still hidden down in the closet trunk. “Before The War,” “In time of The War,” we said, as though it had been the only war on earth.

In 1916, we got our first telephone on the farm, and one of the first pieces of news I remember it bringing us was of a new war. It was a big black wall telephone and you could call “Central” with “a short and a long.” The telephone man walked by our house every week or so to check the blue glass things up on the poles. The line ran across our farm fields, up Bridger's Mountain, and through the Gap. It followed the old Seneca Indian road, and the telephone wires would sing in the wind. In April 1917, Mama got a telephone call that we had declared war on Germany.

So the Swago boys began to go off to war again: Cousin Coe and Cousin Cliff, Cousin
Paul from up at town; and Elbert Messer and Dennis Cloonan; then Jim Auldridge, from down the river road. G.D. wanted to enlist in the navy, and though Mama begged him not to, he wrote anyway, telling them about his navy years. He felt they could use him, needed him, and when the answer came back that they didn't want him, he was quiet and bit on his pipestem. He was over forty years old.

G.D. went all over the county in the winter of 1917, selling war bonds; and he went up to the train to say good-bye to the boys and wrote to Cousin Coe over in France. Mama knitted khaki hug-me-tights and mittens. We had meatless days and talked about the “Starving Armenians” and “The Huns.” One day, when I found a poke of candy out in the elderberry patch, Mama made me throw it away because, she said, the Germans might be dropping pokes of candy down from their airplanes to poison American children.

1918 was the winter of the flu, and when I was better, I knelt down by my bed in my long flannel nightgown to say my prayers: “God keep the boys safe Over There. Don't let the Kaiser kill them. Bring them all home safe.”

At night, G.D. would come home with his copy of the
Toledo Blade
and read us the
news from the Marne, Belleau Wood, and Flanders Fields. And down at the village, they painted the river bridge from red to a dull gray color so the Germans could not see it and bomb it down.

After the armistice, Elbert Messer and Jim Auldridge came home to die, but Cousin Coe and Cousin Paul were safe. Down at school, we learned the poem by heart:

 

In Flanders Fields the poppies grow

Between the crosses row on row

That mark our place and in the sky

The larks still bravely singing fly.

 

Then, almost as suddenly as it had come to us, the war faded into the past. They buried Elbert Messer up on our Graveyard Hill and gave the coffin flag to his mother for, Mama said, you must never bury the flag. So Captain Jim and Elbert lay not too far from one another; and Granny Nancy, whose father had come over with Lafayette, lay just inside the rusted gate. Death and life always run together, so in the last spring of the war, a little boy was born and named for the old Captain. We called him Jimmy, my brother, Young Jim.

With another war behind us and the quiet years ahead, we were all there at home under Bridger's Mountain, and Granny Fanny, eighty years old and her hair suddenly
bobbed off with “the Flappers,” was still running the fields to gather in her pokes of tea herbs: “life everlasting” and pennyroyal. When I walked with her across those autumn waste places and heard her speak the name, “life everlasting,” my mind kept repeating it. It was a dry, gray ugly flower that lay like a talisman in my heart.

By 1918, most of America had left the old agrarian ways behind; yet down on Swago, down on all the little farms of Appalachia, the mountain geography still closed us inward. Granny Fanny's thorn broom handle was still stuck into the world's axis, holding it tight and strong.

B
ecause those years were the years of my
childhood, I might tell them in a way that would break my heart. But my heart does not break. There is a kind of benison that falls sometimes on the fields and mountains. Sometimes it is sunlight; or a slow misty rain; or a goose-feather snow drifting down from the sky; and the mountains ringing the fields, ringing the little village down at the crossroads and the white steeple of the Upper Church. And though I realize that I am old now, so that the years play tricks on me, it is all still there sometimes, an unchanged presence, even the rat manure in the water spring; and sometimes we are still at home and it is summer.

There was our old house with its surrounding yards and milkgap and log outbuildings. Then, a mile away, was the little village of Swago with its store and schoolhouse and its four houses all gathered around the crick and Rush Run. The Lower Church
was just around the hill, and a mile or so up the road was the Dry Crick community with its own white church, called the Upper Church, and its farmhouses and little hilly farms. Grandpa Will, my mother's father, with his neat brown beard and happy blue eyes, lived up Dry Crick, and he had a seckel pear tree that he would shake down for us on summer Sunday afternoons.

Four long miles away was Marlinton, with its little main street and shaded streets of white houses, its new railroad track, new depot, and courthouse square. To the south of us, about two miles down, was Mill Point, where the old Cackley Fort had once stood, where Granny Fanny traded at the country store and G.D. and I went to grind our grain at the waterwheel grist mills. Mill Point was a far journey for us, to be taken only for trade and flour. Cousin Wint's store was closer, down at Swago village, and it was the village and the Dry Crick settlement that made up the hill-narrowed neighborhood, the green rocky enclave that sheltered us and our kin.

We were kin to nearly everybody, married our cousins—like G.D. married Mama—and clung to each other like a nest of cockleburs. All up and down the dirt roads and footpaths were our kin people: Grandpa Will and Grandma Susan, Mama's old parents,
and all the aunts, uncles, great uncles, great aunts, step aunts, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and fourth. We never claimed kin beyond the fourth cousin. Mama's two sisters lived up at town and had running water in their houses and took tub baths.

Every summer at Chautauqua time, when “culture” came to rural America in a tent, I went for a week to visit Aunt Lucy, and Cousin Helen and I could be in Junior Chautauqua, or play hop-scotch, and stroll along the sidewalk eating ice cream cones. And every night we would take tub baths in Aunt Lucy's tub. At home, we had to bathe in a washtub with water out of the rain barrel. There were no comforts such as bathtubs and hop-scotch down at the farm, but the rest of the year I spent there and learned it all by heart.

There were the fields and pastures and Captain Jim's sturdy Dutch cottage. But a dining room and kitchen ell made out of an unpainted sawmill shanty had been stuck onto the back of the house to make more room. Both of the shanty rooms were papered inside with heavy old building paper nailed on with short nails and big round tin caps. The roof of the dining room leaked, and great curves of wallpaper full of rain water
would hang down above the dining table ready to burst. One of us kids would take a table fork, climb up on the table, thrust the fork into the great bubble two or three times so the rain water would pour out. We would catch it in the dishpan and hope that no big rain would come at meal time, particularly when there was company or harvest hands. For as long as we lived there, we coped with this problem in a casual way. It never occurred to anybody to climb up on the roof and fix it, for we could always make do and G.D. was always busy working on writing his short stories, or later, his civics book. He would sit unperturbed, writing up an analysis of the Constitution, as the rain water came pouring down.

We had a fly problem too: no screens, and long before the time of fly spray. In summer the flies would swarm black in the dining room and kitchen and, on a hot and rainy evening, would cover the ceilings where they liked to roost. We always had to keep the food covered or put away in the cupboard, and we would cover the perennial dishes of jams and jellies on the dining room table with an old tablecloth. Just before mealtime the word would go out to “come and help me scare the flies,” and any two of us would close all the window blinds in the dining room, open up one of the outside
doors, and suddenly slam the other. In the darkened room, we would grab up the old tablecloth and a piece of old sheet and beat and flap the air frantically to drive the swarm of black flies before us to the outside door.

The kitchen part of the ell was fairly sturdy and did not leak, though sometimes in summer blades of pale grass might grow through the cracks of the floor. When they did, we pulled them out and wondered at their pale green whiteness, growing there under the dark of the house. Under this open part of the house, we threw our dry midden: dog bones, broken glass jars, bottles, and pieces of broken tools. We threw wet stuff, like leftovers and dish water, into the slop bucket to feed to the hogs.

Around the house was the Little Yard, enclosed with its rough plank fence to protect Mama's flowers from the calves. Outside the Little Yard, in the Big Yard were Grandpa Jim's old log outbuildings: the dug-out springhouse with the log granary up over the top, the chicken house, and out behind the chicken house, the privy with its two square-cut holes. Mama was always mad at Buzz Rogers for cutting the holes square instead of round like in Grandpa Will's privy, which also had pink-sprigged wallpaper and a box of lime.

We milked the cows up at the milkgap
and kept the covered milk crocks in the cold water down in the springhouse. The spring water ran out of a pipe into a wooden water trough that Grandpa Jim had hollowed out with his adz long ago. We churned butter, standing on the stone floor and using an up-and-down wooden churn.

There were two troubles with the springhouse: rat manure from the granary up above kept falling through the cracks of the old logs and down into the water trough where we got our drinking and cooking water, and Grandpa Jim's old drain had been clogged up for forty years.

Every morning, the first one of us to the springhouse would find the bottom of the water trough covered with disintegrating rat turds. Two or three times a day we had to bail all the water out of the trough, wash the turds out, scald the trough with a teakettle of water, then push the trough back in place and wait for the clean water to run. We tried to be careful, but as Granny Fanny said, everybody has to eat a peck of dirt before he dies.

One summer a weasel got into the granary up over the springhouse and the rats ran out and jumped into the limbs of the big apple tree. Hundreds of rats hung there like bunches of black fruit, weighing down the branches of the tree. G.D. and my two
brothers got their guns out and the rats dropped all around—forty or more of them, bloody on the ground in front of the springhouse door.

Every time a good rain came, the drain clogged and the springhouse flooded. All of us would come tearing, laughing and screaming and histing up our skirts and pants legs to wade out into the swirling waters. We would rescue the crocks and the tall churn and its dasher and lug them out under the apple tree until the storm was over and the water run down. Then we would sweep the mud and rat turds off the floor stones and move back in.

The hog pen stood on the hill right above the springhouse. We took it as a sort of easy destiny that we would all eat our peck of dirt. We were never sick either, except with things like mumps and chickenpox, and Mama's gallstones. Captain Jim drank the water for forty-one years and lived to be eighty-eight; Granny Fanny drank it for fifty-eight years and lived to be ninety-two; G.D. drank it, off and on, for fifty-five years and lived to be eighty-seven; but Mama, who drank it for only twenty-six years, lived to be only eighty-two.

The main part of the house that Captain Jim built was clean and had three of the rooms wallpapered, one with big red roses
on the wall. After G.D. was able to pay for it, Mama had a big kitchen range, silver-bright with scrollwork and with a big warming oven. Pressed into its door face were the words “Malleable Steel Range Company, South Bend, Indiana.”

I learned to read from the newspapers pasted on one side of the kitchen wall and from reading the name on the stove and the name, “Mother” on the oats boxes, and “Arbuckle's Coffee,” “Silver Brand Pure Lard,” and “Wheeling Steel.” Before I was old enough to go to school, my brother Ward and my sister Elizabeth would come home with their books and study by the kitchen table at night under the light of a glass oil lamp. I would climb up beside them, and they taught me to read in Mace's
Beginners' History
, stories about Dan Boone, George Rogers Clark, and “Nolichucky Jack.” While Elizabeth and Ward were away at school, I would stand looking out the winter window at the great trees and imagine the hunter men walking there through the shadows until they disappeared through the Cumberland Gap.

G.D. had two cases of books along the wall in the best bedroom: his old school books and stories like
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush
and
In Days of Bruce.
G.D. always was a soft touch for a book salesman. He said
that an education was the only thing “they” couldn't take away, and he was always bringing home a new set of books: a green encyclopedia, and the red and gold set of Charles Dickens, and the green and gold set of the World's Best Literature with hard pieces in it like ones by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Immanuel Kant. I didn't like Immanuel Kant too well, but I liked the Scotch stories, and especially
Lorna Doone
. I read Dickens, Homer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy, and
The Girl of the Limberlost
. Sometimes I would take
Lorna Doone
to the haymow and read it there, lying in the soft golden hay of the loft. On rainy days we played there, jumping and sliding down the steep slippery hills of hay.

To get into the loft, we put our bare feet between the cracks of the logs and climbed up the wall to the door of the mow. The logs were worn with feet climbing up and, thrust into the hole of the door, was Captain Jim's old square-knobbed wooden peg, slick with wear. In a way, this peg was almost a living thing to me. It was just an old door peg, knotted and familiar and strong, and it held the door shut. But it fitted tight into its log as though it was strong enough to hold together the whole barn, the house, the fields, the little village, and all our kinfolk spread up and down Swago Crick.