Milkweed Ladies (8 page)

When the last little shepherd had gone from the stage, Tone Lightner, our village blacksmith, would come in his big Santy Claus suit and give out the presents. Tone was jolly and good, and he always came in acting like he was all out of breath because his reindeer had given him a little trouble. Once when he fell on the footlog crossing a stream, he came in all bloody, with his suit and whiskers torn, and he told us his reindeer had run off with him and nearly spilled the sleigh.

At the schoolhouse too we had neighborhood cake walks, pie suppers, and box suppers. The box was usually a decorated shoebox full of fried chicken, cake, and pickles. The pies were in boxes too, all covered with crepe paper and cut-out pictures or tinsel bows. The big girls worked and agonized over their boxes, for the boys would bid on them when Tone Lightner auctioned them off. The boys who got the boxes would get to eat with the girl whose name was hidden
in each box, and the money went for a new dictionary for the schoolhouse, and later, for a playground swing.

On Swago Crick, both of our churches were Methodist, one a Methodist Episcopal and the other a Methodist Protestant. There was no noticeable variation in faith or service, and the people of the community attended both. The churches were both white frame buildings, and both had dark varnished benches, a raised platform and altar railing, oil lamps in hanging brass brackets, long wood stoves, and wheezy foot-pump organs. Neither had a full-time preacher, but both were served, off and on, by a circuit preacher who came every second Sunday, or as rarely as once a month. Other Sundays we had Sunday school, sometimes in the Upper Church on Sunday morning and in the Lower Church on Sunday afternoon.

The Upper Church was distinguished by its high bell tower and, much later, by its two privies out behind. Porter Kellison was the Sunday school superintendent and led the singing, and Aunt Edna or Nellie Kellison played the organ while Dorsey Little passed the plate.

We kids would get dressed on Sunday mornings and Mama would give us each a penny to take to the Korean orphans. She
would tell Elizabeth and me to tie our pennies in the corners of our handkerchiefs so as not to lose our offerings; then we put on our decorated straw hats and walked barefoot down the lane on our two-mile road to Sunday school. We always carried our shoes and stockings to “save them.” When we got to the culvert just below the church, we would sit down and carefully put on our stockings and our white canvas Sears Roebuck slippers that had been cleaned on Saturday with Old Dutch Cleanser and set out in the sun to dry.

The church bell rang out over the valley, and when all the people had come in and sat in their places, Nellie Kellison went to the organ and Porter Kellison got up to lead our first hymn. It was often “Oh, Come to the Church in the Wildwood.” We would all “rare” back and sing at the top of our lungs, for we put more stock in volume than in modulation for praising God. When we came to the chorus, Porter Kellison and Grandpa Will would come in strong on the bass: “Oh come, come, come, come,” and the great deep “comes” would roll out the open door as though calling all the world home.

My Grandpa Will could read the old shaped notes in the hymnbook for, way back, he and Mama and Grandma Susan had all gone to Singing School. Grandpa
Will said family prayers, and said grace at the table three times a day. He gave money to the church, helped keep the building repaired, and read his Bible. He believed that when we all died, we would meet again in Heaven: he and his father and mother, his six brothers and two sisters, all their children and grandchildren, and all the kin and neighbor folk, gathered together where Jesus had gone to prepare a place with golden stairs and no sin nor sorrow nor parting. Grandpa Will would lift up his head, and his blue eyes would look far away as he sang: “Yes, we'll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river / Gather with the Saints at the river that flows by the throne of God.”

The summer I was eleven, we held a daily Vacation Bible School for the little children at the Lower Church. It was a new thing and a lady came in from way-off to hold the school. Hiram Barns, who lived in a neat painted cottage just above the village and was active in church, had helped with all the plans. The lady's name was Miss Virginia, and Mr. and Mrs. Barns had her to stay with them and fixed their spare room all nice for her. Since I was a big girl then, I helped Miss Virginia with her teaching. She had colored paper and crayons for the little kids, and new songs to teach, and a
little play to put on. I went down to the church every morning, and I loved Miss Virginia. She had a nice soft voice and curly hair and wore lace on her white blouse. I read to the little kids and helped them with their songs. Miss Virginia let me take them outdoors, where we sat in a circle on the grass near the graveyard, and I read them stories about Jesus. The children got to take their pictures home, and on the last day Miss Virginia had a program so all the mothers could come to see.

When Miss Virginia told us good-bye, I almost cried and could think of no one else for a week. Later, we began to hear things about her. It turned out that Miss Virginia had gone away and written a bad story about us in a church magazine. Hiram Barns was a subscriber to the magazine; and when it came, there was a story about the community of S———, by Miss Virginia. In the story she told how it was up in the mountains, how ignorant and crude the people were. She told about Hiram Barns's house and made fun of it and of how Mrs. Barns dipped snuff. Hiram Barns passed the magazine all around the neighborhood, and we all read what Miss Virginia thought about us. I felt sorrow and disillusionment, and, for the first time, I began to wonder about the people beyond Swago Crick.

For all the years of my childhood, our little neighborhood centered on the store, the schoolhouse, and the church, and the narrow roads and paths that ran up and down. Once every summer, we went down to the little railroad flag stop and took the one coach train to town to visit our relatives there. Still our village pattern held, and we walked down over the hill to the store or up Dry Crick to the church night-meetings. Coming home with our lantern through Uncle Dan'l's woodland, we could sometimes hear the small animals scrambling off in the woods or see a piece of foxfire shining at us from an old, rotten log. When we went through the gate at the barn, I always felt the peg set solid in the haymow door, and then old Jack or Shep would begin to bark, and I could see the panes of lamplight shining through the night.

A
unt Malindy was no kin of ours, but all
through my childhood she stayed at our house, a free boarder who always sat in our best rocker. She was very old and very fat and always wore her shining fat dress of black sateen; and she ate enormously, never did a lick of work, never even peeled an apple or snapped a bean, and I loved her and lay safe and warm, pillowed against her sateen breasts.

G.D. always said that she was there because she had no other place to go to; but we never thought why she was so welcome, so well come. We didn't even think to wonder, for she was our Seeress, the Priestess of the Swago. She made the prophecies, the telling of daisies and the writhing of mystic serpents; and she had all the children to rock.

Aunt Malindy was full of signs and portents. She had her death-bell sign, her howling hound dog, and, from her girlhood, that strange, death-ridden omen which she
had seen one long-ago summer midnight: the great fireball screaming in the sky over Buckley Mountain the night her brother Potts was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg.

It's a strange thing about old tales and superstitions: you believe them and you don't. You know that deep down in the depths of them they are as true as the morning, but that all the glittering, eerie surface is as false as false. Nobody comes to visit because you drop a dirty dishrag, but you keep your dishrag clean. And no snake stings a tree to kill the tree, but back in the Garden, his eyes were as green as glass.

There were so many snake stories that they crawled slowly on the edges of a child's sleep. To begin with, Satan had gone into the Garden in a snakeskin, and now the black snakes sucked the eggs in our chicken house, and it was rumored that they sometimes sucked the cows. The snake stories were most often Aunt Malindy's; but they could be Uncle Dock's or Cousin Rush's or the true one G.D. told. Aunt Malindy told how her sister Mag had been charmed by a beautiful red and blue circled viper whose eyes fixed on her so she couldn't move. At last a dog ran between her and the snake and broke the spell. Aunt Malindy's other sister had been bit by a copperhead in dog days, and every year after that, for fifty
years, in dog days her sister's leg would swell up and mottle with red, coppery spots.

Mad black snakes smelled like cucumbers. Hoop snakes with horns in their tails would put the horns in their mouths, roll down the hill, stick their tail-horn into a tree trunk and the tree would die. And there were glass snakes. When you hit them, they flew into a million pieces and then went back together again. One summer Sunday morning, G.D. had come upon a whole nest of copperheads by a shale cliff on the riverbank—a tight, writhing coil, and others crawling around lifting their arrowheads. He cut a strong willow withe and slashed and slashed until he sickened from the venomous smell. Then he walked back up the road to church and brought some of the men to see. When they stretched the dead snakes out on a flat rock, they counted a hundred and twenty-three.

There were panther stories too, and always, just over the Pinnacle, lay the dark mystique of the wilderness with its feral footpads and yellow-green eyes. There was the panther that had followed Mama's buggy through the pine forest over at Pickens, and the panther that had gone to sleep in the cattle scales. They told that Cousin Joe Buckley kept a pet panther who slept with him every night tame as a cat, until one
night when Joe awoke to teeth pinching his throat.

Sometimes, at our sugar-makin' campfire, G.D. would tell of the night Grandpa Jonathan-the-Elder fell asleep by his sugar fire and a panther came up and sniffed his face. Grandpa Jonathan lay very still and played dead; and the panther scratched around, covered him up with leaves, and left him cooling there. Grandpa Jonathan jumped up, filled a kettle with firebrands, and started to the Tommy cabin; but he heard the panther following him and could see his eyes in the night. Everytime the panther moved close, Grandpa Jonathan would throw a burning brand, until at last he got safe to the cabin. Next morning when he got up, a little skiff of snow had fallen; and there, on the outside of the window sill, were the prints of the panther's forepaws where he had reared up to look in at Grandpa through the pane. In the dark night, after we had sugared off and were trekking wearily home, I often wished for a little kettle of burning firebrands. Behind me, in the dark, I could always sense the sneaking, yellow shape and feel its green slanty eyes.

We had taboos, and a lot of them had good reason: Never stand under a locust
tree during a lightning storm. Never eat a bite of food in the privy house, for every bite you eat there you feed to the Devil. Do not pick up toads for they give you warts. Do not play in the fire or with matches, or you'll wet the bed that night. Never touch a thousand-legged worm. Never kill a ladybug or your house will burn. Never kill a news bee or you'll get bad news. Never milk on the left side of a cow. Never bellow at a mad bull. Don't sleep in the light of the full moon, or you'll go moon-mad and turn blue.

If a cow is bewitched and won't give her milk down, sprinkle salt and pepper on the root of her tail. If a dog howls at night, a soul is passing. When the “death bell” rings in your ears, no one else can hear it. When you hear it, you will die. Always cut your brush in the dark of the moon. If you can't find your cows, talk to a grandaddy spider and he will point one of his front legs to show you which way they've gone. Yellow-root tea will cure a sore throat; a piece of fat side-meat tied on your foot will draw out a thorn; stump water is good for flea bites and running sores.

Aunt Malindy and Mama both had their old songs and ballads; and, in summer when the men were away, we would sit on the porch in the evening and sing together, or we would sing snatches as we worked:

 

Where have you been, Lord Randall my son?

Where have you been, my own dearest one?

 

Or:

 

A carrion crow sat on an oak

Fol do riddle de, Lol de riddle de

High ding doe…

 

Or Granny Fanny's thin monotone would quaver from the shadows: “Oh the black and the bay and the dapple gray.”

From Aunt Malindy, and from Uncle Dock too, we had the lore of the fields and woodlands, as we ran their paths in summer and made up our games. Never look in a bird's nest or the baby birds will die. Weasels kill to suck the blood. A red squirrel will eat off the private parts of a gray squirrel. Talk to a doodle bug down in his dung hole, and he will tell you the secret of the earth.

We saw the baby skunks walking along in a straight row behind their mother, perfectly disciplined and with their little tails waving back and forth in rhyme. And we watched the chipmunks frisking along the fence rows, found the soft baby rabbits in their nests. Never touch a baby rabbit. Never kill a buzzard. If you see an owl in the daytime, bad luck will come before dark.

Once, G.D. took me out to the smokehouse to see the big white owl. I must have been three or four and he came and woke me up. He picked me up, wrapped me in a blanket, and carried me outdoors. Something had been killing our hens that roosted on the “plate” of the log smokehouse, and G.D. had set a trap. It was a cold, snow-covered night, and I remember the snow and the great white owl there in the lantern light. His eyes were big and golden and had fiery streaks in them. I looked at him, and he looked back at me. I felt his hate and his fear. He seemed to be looking at me alone and asking me a question I could never forget.

Up at the cow spring, we whittled out water wheels, set them in the rushing water, and watched them whirl around. We whittled out wooden boats too, and set them adrift on the flood: “Boats of mine a-boating / When will all come hone?” Or we made beautiful cornstalk canoes, or clay pipes from the blue rock we found cropping out along the ledge. In spring we would make willow whistles from the willow withes. We slipped the bark and cut holes in the sides so they could whistle their April tunes.

We played Buckeyes with the nuts of the buckeye tree, a scrubby type of horse chestnut.
Because of their coloring and general fat slickness, buckeyes made perfect white-faced cattle. We removed them from their husks, polished them to a shining glow, and gathered them into “herds” on the great limestone rocks. Sometimes I played at driving my buckeye cattle in a great lowing herd to the Indian battle down at Point Pleasant; or, like Captain Jim, to market over at Staunton, Virginia, across Bull Pasture Mountain. My fat herd would wind along the leafy forest roads, and I would be behind them on my high-headed black stallion, winding through the autumn shadows until we disappeared forever into the trees.

We skipped rocks, hurled apples from long green withes, rolled rocks down the hillside—careful not to kill a cow—or twisted groundhogs out of their holes with a forked stick. We played a more dangerous game with Auldridge's old roany bull. He was on one side of a leaning rusty wire fence; we, on the other. We would put our fists through the wire and push him in the head to make him mad. We were so close I could smell his breath and see the curly hair on his forehead, the little black flies crawling in the corners of his rheumy eyes. We dared each other to taunt him until he got mad, backed up, and began to paw the ground. We took off then, but I can still see his red eye-corners
with the black flies crawling in them, like the He-Beast, the Minotaur out of my grade school reader, who lived in the Cretan Labyrinth and ate the seven youths and seven maidens every year.

Often as we grew older, Ward and his best friend Jess would go off fishing or setting “cat” hooks, and Elizabeth and I would play “playhouse” up on the rock cliffs. We gathered armfuls of green moss and spread it for rugs on our floors. We made little chairs and sofas of rocks and spread these. Then we would serve tea in acorn cups and saucers, talk “lady talk,” and wear decorated hats. Elizabeth was the town “milliner,” and we would gather a big weed leaf that grew nearby, called hatweed, about as big as a rhubarb leaf and about that droopy shape. Elizabeth would fasten the hat leaves together in the back with a sharp thorn and decorate them with hillside flowers, the ones her “customers” used for money: oxeye daisies, black-eyed Susans, wild roses, and pink milkweed bloom.