Weeping Willow (13 page)

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Authors: Ruth White

BOOK: Weeping Willow
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“I don’t know, Jesse …”
“We can do what we want if we’re careful, Tiny.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Just that. There are ways to keep from getting pregnant.”
“So they say.”
“Well, I can’t wait, Tiny. Can you honestly say it’s easy for you?”
“No, it ain’t easy, Jesse.”
“There! Will you think about it?”
“Well …”
“Promise me you’ll think about it.”
“I promise.”
We crawled out from under the willow and joined the others. Shortly thereafter Vern came driving up the mountain with Phyllis beside him and Beau and Luther in the back. He parked the truck a ways from the cabin and watched us. The boys took the hint. Darkness was coming anyway. They left, and then Vern left, too.
 
Afterward Bobby Lynn, Rosemary, and I built up the fire and started singing “On Top of Old Smokey”—all forty verses.
It was a crystal-clear night with millions of stars all around us. The moon was full to bustin’, and so round and bright it seemed like you could walk out to the edge of the mountaintop and reach right up and grab it in your arms.
Then Rosemary brought out a pack of Lucky Strikes and we started puffing like we smoked cigarettes regular. But it was really our first smoke unless you count the corn silks as kids.
“What brought this on, Rosemary?” Bobby Lynn said. “How come you got cigarettes?”
“Oh … Roy!” Rosemary sputtered. “He said the other day that no wife of his was ever going to smoke cigarettes. I never wanted to smoke till he said that. So today at the store I felt like buying a pack.”
“You’re strange, Rosemary Layne,” I said. “You know that? You’re strange.”
She grinned, and puffed.
We practiced holding the cigarette just right, and flashing it around for dramatic effect as we talked. It wasn’t bad if you pulled the smoke in just a little bit, and blew it out real fast before you could taste it.
Then Rosemary said, “I have a suggestion.”
We watched her light up a second cigarette.
“Who wants to play One Question?”
We were silent.
One Question was more a test of loyalty than a game. Only the best of friends played it, and we had never played it before. Everybody must want to play, and everybody must swear never to tell the answer to the One Question.
What you did was ask the One Question you always wanted to ask your friend, but you didn’t because it was too personal. And when it came your turn to answer, you had to tell the truth. It was no telling what they might ask. Still I said, “Okay, I’ll play.”
“Me too,” Bobby Lynn said.
So we got in a huddle and drew straws. Bobby Lynn lost, so she would get the One Question first. Rosemary and I walked away from her and discussed what we wanted to ask. We had to agree, and we had to word the question so she couldn’t answer with a simple yes or no. Then we walked back to the fire and sat down one on either side of her. She seemed to be holding her breath.
“This is our One Question for you, Bobby Lynn,” Rosemary said. “What happened between your mama and daddy?”
All the air went out of Bobby Lynn, and she drooped.
“They were fighting all the time,” she said quickly as if she had rehearsed her answer. “And she wanted him to leave. So they are getting a divorce. I haven’t seen him in months, and I miss him.”
She seemed real sad and I was almost sorry we had asked her.
“She said the feeling was gone,” Bobby Lynn went on almost like she was talking to herself or thinking out loud. “And he said—I’ll never forget it—he said, ‘Love is more than a feeling.’”
Nobody said anything for a while.
Bobby Lynn said it again, “Love is more than a feeling.”
Then silence.
We couldn’t ask anything else, and she seemed to be finished.
“Okay, Tiny,” Rosemary said. “Your turn.”
The two of them got up and walked into the shadows. I couldn’t imagine what they would ask me, but I suddenly thought of Vern, and my blood ran cold. Could they possibly suspect? How could they know? No, it wasn’t possible. Still I couldn’t shake the paralyzing fear that somehow they would word their question so that I would have to tell. I would lie, no matter what. I would never tell.
They came back and I was afraid they would see how scared I was.
“Who is your daddy?” Bobby Lynn said quickly.
Was that all? I laughed.
“Do you know?” Rosemary said.
“Only One Question!” I reminded her. “Sure I know. He was a soldier and he loved my mother very much. He planned to marry her—I know he did—but he was killed at Pearl Harbor five months before I was born.”
Sure it was a lie. Somehow I couldn’t tell them he went away right after Pearl Harbor was bombed and never even wrote a letter, like my mama and I did not matter at all.
“That’s all,” I said. “Except for his name—Ernest Bevins.”
“That’s so sad,” Rosemary said.
Then she mumbled it was her turn. Our One Question for Rosemary was something Bobby Lynn and I had wondered about a lot.
“Have you and Roy done it?”
Rosemary grinned.
“Yeah” was all she said, and too late we realized our mistake. She didn’t have to tell us anything else because we asked a yes/no question. Bobby Lynn and I looked at each other, disgusted, and Rosemary laughed and laughed.
“Okay.” She yielded at last. “I’ll say more. We did it three times during football season. I wanted to beat Clintwood so bad, I promised Roy if he would make a touchdown, I’d do it.”
“And he did!” Bobby Lynn said.
“And he made two more touchdowns after that,” Rosemary said with a smile. “One against Bristol and one against Richlands.”
We giggled.
“But after football season I wouldn’t do it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I was afraid of getting in trouble.”
“Well, I have heard,” I said, “that once you start doing it, you can’t stop.”
“That is a great big lie,” Rosemary said. “It was easy to stop. And I am through till I’m married. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you know.”
It was midnight before we got to bed. Bobby Lynn and Rosemary shared Grandpa’s big bed that night, and I slept in the bed where I was born, and where I slept with Mama until I was three years old. I opened up the window all the way to let in the gentle night breeze. The homemade quilt, stitched by the hands of my Grandmother Lambert, was fully visible in the moonlight. It was a sunburst pattern in bright yellow and red. Lovingly I ran my hand over it and wondered about the woman who put it together. Was she in love with my Grandpa Lambert?
Nessie settled down with a sigh on the rug and I stretched out on the bed. I looked down at my body, firm and pretty in the moonlight. Yes, I thought, I have arrived. I have reached womanhood, and I am not ashamed of these feelings I have for Jesse. We want each other and it is as simple and natural as that. Then why this feeling of anxiety? Why do I hesitate to do what he wants me to do? I fell into an uneasy sleep.
It was not the bright moonlight that woke me, nor the shadow of the weeping willow sweeping my pillow. It wasn’t even the rich, heavy scent of honeysuckle that hung like something solid in the air. But I was aware of all these things as I rolled over and opened my eyes to the night. It was something else—something more subtle, illusive.
“What is it?” I whispered.
Then I saw her shadow interwoven among the shadows of the weeping willow. Sweeping … swaying … moving rhythmically with the pendent branches ever so gently across the wall, the bed, and my face on the pillow.
 
Willa, Willa, on my pilla’ …
 
Quietly I moved to the window and looked out. It was Willa in a long, full, lacy white gown dancing around the willow tree in the moonlight.
“Willa!” I whispered, laughing, and she looked at me and winked.
She went on dancing, breathlessly beautiful, and graceful as a swan with her lovely red hair floating about her.
“Willa,” I said again softly, and she came to the window, laughing mischievously, and knelt. We sat there, one on either side of the window, our arms touching on the windowsill, looking into each other’s eyes. I could smell her honeysuckle breath as she panted slightly. Her cheeks were full and red.
“You feel it, too, don’t you, Willa?”
She rolled her eyes toward the moon, and smiled mysteriously.
“Is it the spring?” I said. “Or is it the moon? Is it that old black magic, Willa?”
She looked steadily into my eyes.
“Or is it just a trick?” I whispered to her, and the breeze caught my words and lifted them into the night. “Is falling in love just a trick that nature plays on us?”
She said nothing.
“I want to be sure, Willa. I’m going to wait until I’m sure it’s the right thing to do.”
The next day I said no to Jesse.
 
Just as I figured, the weeks following were so frantic not a one of us had time to spit. At the crack of dawn we rolled out of bed. And up on the mountain with the sky right on top of you, dawn seemed to crack earlier than it did down in the bottom.
We were grumpy as we ate bread and jelly or something left over from the night before. We each took a pan full of water—cold because none of us wanted to build a fire to heat it. I went off to my bedroom, Rosemary to the other, and Bobby Lynn took the kitchen, and we washed ourselves as best we could, shivering, shaking, and scratching bug bites. You’d be surprised how fast you can wash yourself under those conditions.
Then we dressed, piled into the pickup, and rode the twelve miles to school, where we dragged through the day, feeling grungy.
Right after school we changed into our shorts and tennis shoes and headed for the patch. Along with Aunt Evie, Mama, Luther, Beau, and Phyllis, Cecil and his brothers and sisters, and sometimes Roy, we all picked until our fingers were crimson and our backs in pain. Then Mama and Cecil took the berries down the mountain. That week Mama struck a deal with the A & P and the coal company store in Ruby Valley. Both stores wanted all we could pick. We had hit the big time. Mama handled all the money and kept track of how many quarts everybody picked. She made a rule also that “a nickel on every quart goes to Tiny ’cause this is Tiny’s land and Tiny’s strawberries. Without her, none of us would be making any money.”
Her saying that made me feel important, but selfconscious, too. I never had told my friends about my land because we never bragged to each other.
“You own all this?” Bobby Lynn said, sweeping her arms around the mountaintop.
“Yeah, my Grandpa Lambert left it to me.”
“
You
? Just
you?”
Rosemary said. “Not your whole family?”
“No, just me.”
“Wow!”
They looked at each other and grinned. “That’s cool, Tiny.”
Cool. I would have to remember that word. Everybody was saying it. Yeah, it was cool, thanks to Grandpa Lambert.
At the end of three weeks we were plum picked out, and we didn’t leave many strawberries on the ground that year. We counted up our money and squealed. Rosemary and Bobby Lynn made just over $100.00 each and I made $160.00. It was the most I had ever made on strawberries.
Saturday afternoon, Rosemary drove us down to the Clevingers’ to get the Henry J.
Mrs. Clevinger was hanging out clothes in her back yard.
“My goodness, just look at you little brown boogers and it ain’t even June yet!”
We crowded around the Henry J. It was olive-green, six years old, and not a scratch in sight. Only problem was Bobby Lynn and I couldn’t drive, but Rosemary was going to teach us.
Then a funny thing happened. Bobby Lynn’s daddy drove up. He looked handsome, wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. Bobby Lynn got the strangest look on her face when she saw him, like she wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She walked out to him and they fell into each other’s arms, and started to cry, both of them. I never loved Bobby Lynn more than at that moment. I knew somehow exactly how she felt, seeing her daddy like that for the first time in months. I had to turn away and look at something else because I wanted to cry, too. How wonderful it must be, I thought, to have a daddy like that—a real daddy. And the way he cried when he hugged her—gosh, I loved him for that.
Mrs. Clevinger was standing watching them and she had tears in her eyes, too.
Rosemary cleared her throat and poked me.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.”
So Rosemary went over and said to Mrs. Clevinger, “If you’ll give me the key, me and Tiny will go for a ride and leave y’all alone for a while.”
“Oh, I’ll go, too,” she said quickly. “He came to see Bobby Lynn.”
She gave the key to Rosemary.
“Be back directly,” she called to Bobby Lynn and her daddy.
They were coming across the yard with their arms around each other.
“There’s iced tea in the Frigidaire,” she continued, and waved.
Mr. Clevinger looked at us, and smiled, but Bobby Lynn didn’t seem to see or hear a thing, except her daddy.
“Come in the house, Daddy,” she said.
Mrs. Clevinger climbed in the back seat and looked away toward the courthouse steeple. Rosemary got in the driver’s seat with me beside her. We headed out of town and down the river toward Kentucky. I was excited to be in the Henry J. I kept looking for somebody we knew from school so we could stop and show off our car.
“I know everybody’s blaming me,” Mrs. Clevinger said suddenly after we had been driving for about five minutes.
Rosemary and I exchanged glances.
“For what, Miz Clevinger?” I said.
“For breaking up the family,” she said. “They’re all talking about me.”
“I don’t think so,” Rosemary said.
“Oh yeah, they are. But I didn’t want to be married anymore. I couldn’t stand it no more.”
“Why not?” I said and turned around to look at her.
She appeared very childish sitting there gazing out the window with one hand hanging out. She watched the passing hills.
“Well, if you could stay in love, it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “But you don’t stay in love, you know. Nobody does.”
That puzzled me, but I didn’t say anything out loud. I was thinking, Of course people stay in love. I knew Jesse and I would always be in love. And what about Roy and Rosemary?
But to my surprise Rosemary said, “I know what you mean, Miz Clevinger.”
“Do you, Rosemary? Slim and me, we were your age, you know—kids. And we were so love-sick we didn’t know beans!”
Ahead of us there was a crowd of people gathered by the river at the mouth of Bull Creek. Rosemary slowed down so we could see what was going on. It was the Holy Rollers gathered for a baptism.
“Oh, let’s stop and watch,” I said.
I liked to see them carrying on when they came out of the water. Rosemary pulled off the road and parked.
“Everybody says a woman can’t be happy without a man,” Mrs. Clevinger went on. “But I’ll swaney, I’m happier now than I ever was married to Slim.”
The Holy Rollers were singing:
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.
 
About a dozen people were draped in white robes and lined up to be ducked by the preacher.
“I wish I didn’t feel so guilty about Bobby Lynn. She’s embarrassed, and she misses her daddy,” Mrs. Clevinger said.
“Let’s walk down to the water,” Rosemary said.
So we got out of the car and walked down through the weeds, which were coated with coal dust, and our legs got dirty. Mrs. Clevinger lifted her frock above her knees.
We watched the preacher and his helper baptize the people one by one “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Then they came out of the water shouting.
“He worshed away my sins,” an old woman said as she hugged us all.
“Git shed of thy guilt, sinner!” the preacher was crying. “Git shed of it all today!”
“I will!” Mrs. Clevinger said loudly. Startled, we turned to look at her. “I want to be baptized.”
“Haven’t you been baptized?” Rosemary whispered to her, obviously embarrassed.
“Not like this. I want to be baptized in the river!” she announced.
“Come on, sister, come with me,” a woman said, placing her arm around Mrs. Clevinger, and leading her away.
“Oh boy …” Rosemary mumbled.
“Won’t you join your mother, young’uns?” an old man said to us.
“Our mother? Oh … no. No thanks,” I said.
Everybody was looking at us, and we were selfconscious. We watched the huddle of women where Mrs. Clevinger had disappeared. Very soon she reappeared wearing one of the white robes. She had her arms folded neatly across her chest in the form of an X. The women led her to the river, and when she waded out in the water to join the preacher, the robe ballooned out around her and floated on top of the water. The sun was shining on the water, throwing rainbows and halos all around the people in the water, including Mrs. Clevinger with her blond hair a-flutter and her robe floating around her. Why, she looked like an angelic little girl.
“I don’t believe my dad-burned eyes,” Rosemary said.
“Me neither.” I stifled a giggle as the whole thing suddenly struck me as funny. I choked.
“Shut up!” Rosemary punched me.
“I baptize you, Violet Clevinger, in the name of the Father …”
And he ducked her.
The people started singing and clapping their hands.
Oh, Beulah Land! Sweet Beulah Land!
As on the highest mount 1 stand,
I look away across the sea
Where mansions are prepared for me
And view the shining glory shore,
My heaven, my home forevermore.
 
Some shouted, others spoke in tongues, and still others lay down and rolled around on the riverbank in religious ecstasy. It was this ceremony that earned them the name of Holy Rollers.
Mrs. Clevinger came up gasping. The cold water had knocked the breath out of her. I remembered that some of the holler families channeled their sewage into the river, but I quickly pushed that thought away.
Her hair looked dark now and clung tightly to her head and neck. The women hurried her back into the huddle, and shortly she emerged again in her own clothes.
She came back to us then, waving and smiling at the crowd. They were clapping for her like she was a celebrity, and she was acting like one!
“I’m ready to go now,” she said to us.
So we went to the Henry J. Rosemary turned us around and we headed for Black Gap.
“I’m just not cut out to be a wife,” Mrs. Clevinger went on as if our conversation had not been interrupted at all. “Not everybody is.”
That did it.
I had the giggles.
Rosemary slapped me on the thigh.
“Shut up!”
But it was too late.
“We only got married because we thought we had to,” Mrs. Clevinger confessed, unaware that I was in the throes of a fit. “And then it turned out to be a false alarm.”
Rosemary smiled then, and I thought, Oh no, here it comes. She’s going to get tickled, too.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Mrs. Clevinger went on. “I just woke up one morning and realized I was an old married woman and I didn’t like it. I remember thinking, How did I get here? What hit me?
“I felt like I had been … well … hypnotized or something. And I was just coming out of it. That night I looked at Slim and I thought, ‘Who is he? That’s not the cute boy I married. This man’s feet stink, and he belches, and sometimes he pees in the back yard!’”
That’s when Rosemary and I both sputtered all over the dashboard, and Mrs. Clevinger caught it, too.
Thus we entered a season of laughter—the summer of 1959.

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