One Foot in Eden (9 page)

For a while I tried to make myself believe that things would be all right, that Billy was a good man and two people could have a good life without young ones. Yet it hurt each Sunday when me and Billy went to church and all the others of our age had their babies or when we went to Momma and Daddy’s and Ginny’s two young ones filled up the house with a happiness only children can bring. Afterwards when me and Billy went home, our house seemed quiet and empty. Billy felt it too. I knew he blamed himself. If I felt less a woman for having no baby, I knew he felt less a man for not being able to plant his seed in me.

Billy spoke not a word about what we’d found out from Doctor Wilkins but the knowledge laid over our house like a pall. We couldn’t talk about it. What was the good when words couldn’t change what laid on our hearts. I’d had to talk of it to someone though so one Sunday after noon-dinner when Billy and Daddy was out at the barn I told Momma and Ginny what Doctor Wilkins had said.

‘And he claimed there was nothing to be done?’ Momma asked.

‘Yes ma’am,’ I said, and saying it out loud made it all the more certain.

‘Oh, Amy,’ Momma said.

She took me in her arms and cried for me.

‘Doctors don’t know everything,’ Ginny said, her voice cold as a creek stone. ‘There’s them who has a learning you don’t get out of books, a knowledge no man has the least notion of.’

‘What are you talking around, Ginny?’ I asked.

‘I’m saying there’s one person with the knowing of how to cure what no town doctor can.’

‘Maybe it’s best to just let things be, Amy,’ Momma said, for she knew the what and who Ginny’s talk was sidling toward.

‘That old woman knows things,’ Ginny said. ‘She might could help Amy.’

‘Don’t you go and see that old woman,’ Momma said. ‘If you and Billy ain’t meant to have young ones it’s the Lord’s will. Why you and Billy got other things for to…’

Momma didn’t finish for she caught sight of Billy standing on the other side of the screen door.

‘It could have been you with the problem,’ Billy said as he drove us back home. ‘If it was I’d have never gone blabbing about it all over the valley. Maybe it is something wrong with you. For all I know that doctor didn’t have no reckoning of what was wrong. He was liable to say near anything to get his five dollars.’

Billy’s neck vein pronged out like a dousing stick. He gripped the steering wheel like it was something he wanted to choke to death.

‘Spread it around just to make sure that everybody knows it’s my failing and not yours.’

‘That ain’t what I was doing, Billy,’ I said.

‘Damn you to hell for talking of it with others,’ Billy said. He’d never near spoke such a thing to me before. He’d not said it to the hail when it beat down his tobacco or to the cow when it hoofed him and cracked his rib. But he’d said it to me.

The next Sunday at church it was clear Momma had scattered words to the other women about me and Billy. Billy saw it too and there was fury in his eyes for the women and for me. Each sad-mouthed word or ruthful look unyoked us a little more.

‘You poor dear,’ Martha Whitmire said and hugged me to her.

‘It’s a stout burden for any woman to carry,’ Sue Burrell added, looking all sorrowful.

I knew Momma meant well but her telling the others made it harder. What those women meant to be pity seemed to me little more than gloating. That was a hard-hearted way to think about other folks and in the deepest part of me I knew it wasn’t just the other women I’d turned hard-hearted toward. I stood up with the others and mouthed the old hymns like I always did but those words stirred me no more now than they would a barn rat. He’d given a passel of young ones to every other woman in that church but allowed me never a one, though I’d prayed hard morning and night now for a year. How could He give my momma nine and my sister not yet eighteen two and leave me fallow as a December corn field. If I was being punished for what happened to Matthew, that was wrong. How could something I did at twelve, something that was more accident than meanness, be grudged against me for the rest of my life? Not a sparrow falls from sky without His knowledge, the Bible claimed. Don’t that include children that fall from a loft, I told myself.

‘Don’t you go and see that old woman,’ Momma said, but I did go, on a January morning when snow laid on the path that followed the river upstream, the river getting faster and skinny, beech trees and rocks looming on each side of the trail as the gorge got narrower like a giant book that’s slow getting shut. Or maybe more like a steel leg-hold trap, I thought, looking up at the big rocks that jagged out over me like teeth. The land got dark and shadowy because the sun couldn’t get in without it was full noon, clumps of mistletoe the only color in the trees. I’d once heard my granddaddy claim the Cherokees had stayed clear of this place, wouldn’t even hunt here.

It was easy enough to figure why the few folks who’d lived here called this part of the gorge The Dismal, because you couldn’t help but feel that way as you passed through. I walked by the old Chapman place that was now nothing but a stone chimney. It looked like a tombstone there all by itself with no cabin to surround it.

Where Wolf Creek poured into the river I saw Luke Murphree’s place. His house still stood but the boards was gray and wormy, the tin roof brown like November leaves. Grandma had told me how Luke’s property had bumped up against Widow Glendower’s land and he’d not bothered to fence his cattle in. They’d been bad to wander onto the old woman’s place and eat her apples and trample her beans.

Then one May the cattle started getting sick. Daddy allowed it was from eating the leaves of a cherry tree Luke had felled. Others said blackleg. But Luke swore his cattle had been hexed. Whatever it was six cows died that May, and soon enough after Luke and his family followed the Chapmans out of the hollow. No one else moved in.

Nor likely to, Grandma had said.

Glendower was up here by herself now, for she had no kin as far as anyone on the river knew. There had been many another story about her I’d heard growing up. How once Lindsey Kilgore saw her rise out of a trout pool he’d been fishing, her body forming itself out of the water. And Janey Suttles saw her in a graveyard, the grave flowers turning brown and wilting like as if frost-bit wherever her shadow fell.

I’d heard all such tales from Grandma, on a winter night when me and the other young ones huddled up near the fireplace. Wind had been whipping through the gorge and the limbs of the big beech scratching the tin roof like something trying to get in. Grandma had told us the ways of witches and the signs of them, everything of what they could do to you and you to them.

We kids was so scared we wouldn’t head up the stairs to bed without Daddy going first. Daddy scoffed and told us Granny was just pulling our leg, that there wasn’t no such thing as witches, that Widow Glendower was a harmless old soul who’d learned to doctor with roots and leaves and tree bark back when folks had to tend to their own selves when they got sick.

‘That old woman has helped many another person when they wasn’t no one else to doctor them and now some of them same people call her a witch,’ Daddy said as he tucked the quilts around us.

But after he’d snuffed the lamp and went downstairs I couldn’t help wondering why if he argued there was no such thing as witches he’d nailed a horseshoe upside down above the front door the first day he and Momma had moved into this house. And why he’d never had a notion to take it down.

The trail followed the creek deeper into the hollow. Beech trees got thicker, snuffing out more of what little light dribbled in. Soon rocks big as haystacks skinnied the trail. I kept my eyes up. Some of the old folks claimed there was still a few panthers around and this seemed as likely a spot to find one as any. All of everything was quiet, even the creek as it flowed under a skimming of ice. A part of me wanted to point my feet in the other direction, follow Wolf Creek back down to the river and on home. I kept hoofing up the path. I wanted a baby and Widow Glendower was near the last hope I had of getting one.

I had no reckoning of how far up the creek she lived but after I passed the big rocks the woods opened up. I saw smoke and then the chimney and then the cabin itself. A black dog big as a calf wiggled out from under the porch and barked as I stepped across the walk-log. Then it disappeared back under the cabin. Widow Glendower opened the door and came out on the porch.

‘Who be you?’ she asked. Her voice was raspy, like her throat had dotted over with rust from not being used.

‘Amy,’ I said, and almost spoke Boone instead of Holcombe. ‘Amy Holcombe,’ Widow Glendower said, saying it slow and thoughtful-like.

‘I was a Boone before I married. My Daddy’s Randall Boone.’

‘From over near Tamassee?’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘And Lillie Boone is your grandma.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ I said. ‘Me and my husband Billy live down the river now. Our land borders Sarah Winchester’s place.’

‘I know Sarah,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘I cured her of the thrush a while back. I caught her young ones too. That youngest boy, he come late. He was so husky he near killed his momma before I got him into the world. He back from soldiering yet?’

‘He’s been back for a couple of months now,’ I said.

‘Step closer, girl,’ Widow Glendower said.

I walked up to the first step. She wore a gingham dress wrinkly as her face, a black shawl on her bony shoulders. Her backbone bowed and made her lean a ways over herself. She reminded me of something with that stooped body and the black shawl hanging down from her shoulders. Hanging like wings, I thought. Then I knew what it was she favored.

We passed no words for a minute as she studied over me. I studied over her as well, her eyes gray and hard-seeming as granite tombstones, her skin paled white as a mushroom stem, white as the fish I once saw in a cave, fish that had swam in the dark so long they’d lost all their color and even their eyes. Her hair was white as her face, long and tangly like it hadn’t been combed in years. To make people fancy you a witch you could do no better, I thought.

My thoughts must have showed plain as the mistletoe I’d seen in the trees.

‘You ain’t feared of me, are you?’ she asked.

I didn’t rightly know how to answer, for either way seemed wrong.

She smiled then, and I saw for all her years she still had teeth. They wasn’t black and gnarly but white and not a one missing. It seemed a warm smile and I remembered what Daddy had said about her helping the sick when there’d been no one else.

‘You been listening to slack talk if you are, girl, listening to folks what will say the worst of anyone who keeps to theirselves. What they claiming me for, a witch?’

‘I never believed such,’ I said.

‘No,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘You wouldn’t. You seem a girl with more smarts than to believe a silly something like that.’

She tightened the shawl around her neck.

‘It’s too cold to stand here and visit. You come inside.’

She turned and stepped through the door, not looking back to see if I followed.

I walked into a front room dour like a root cellar, the only light yellow hearth-flames that licked the bottom of a copper kettle.

‘Set your body down,’ she said and nodded at a split-cane chair by the hearth. She leaned into the fire and lifted the kettle, then stepped into the other room.

My eyes started to find their way in the dark. I looked around the room. There wasn’t much of anything besides another split-cane chair on the other side of the hearth. No clock ticked on the fireboard and there wasn’t a lamp or a single picture or a Bible. A trunk made of ash wood laid in the far corner, its top painted blue like as if someone had started a job they hadn’t troubled to finish.

Widow Glendower came back in the room with two tin cups in her hand.

‘Here,’ she said as she reached me a cup. ‘Most folks can’t hazard how often a time something warm can cure what ails a body.’

I laid the cup on my lap, my hands holding it steady. The coffee looked the color of the river after spring rains.

‘Taste of it,’ Widow Glendower said, raising her cup to her lips.