My Old True Love (17 page)

They had what they called a bust-out on further north of us. I had never heard of such a thing. They said this woman was in her house cooking supper with two of her young’uns and all at once it come the biggest clap of thunder she’d ever heard but it did not come from the natural place. It come from under her
feet
and everything went perfect black and then everything started to slide. They found the house at the bottom of the mountain and it took them over an hour to dig them out. It was a pure and simple miracle that she lived to tell the story as they said every bone in her was broke. The only thing they could figure was that it had rained so much that the ground held as much as it could and then what it could not just busted out. As if I did not have enough to worry about, I laid awake night after night worrying about us having one of them bust-outs here.

Yes, I was getting to be a pretty decent worrier.

But the rain finally slacked off and quit way up toward the first of
May and I could hardly stand to wait for it to dry off enough before I hit them fields with a vengeance. Things was no more than up and tender green when it come a hard freeze on the second day of June that killed most everything I had.

I don’t know what I would have done without Larkin and John Wesley. I guess we would have starved to death that winter for sure, though we come damn near to it as it was. But I’m trying to get ahead of myself here.

The time come for Hackley to jump off that fence but he didn’t jump. They had to push him off.

L
ARKIN AND ME WAS
in the field behind the house planting what few rows of corn I had left when here come Julie just tearing up stumps. She was hollering the whole time saying, “Larkin, Arty, Larkin, Arty, Larkin, Arty.” I thought she was going to fall up before she finally managed to say, “Mary wants you to come. A bunch of soldiers has come and took Hackley and a whole passel of others with them. They was just going past Jim Leake’s store when I went by down there.” And I said as if it really made some sort of difference—but in my own defense I was sort of addle-brained—“What kind of soldiers?” And she looked at me like I was a fool before she went back down the hill at a dead run, “Gun-toting soldiers is all I know.” A look went between me and Larkin and then both of us broke to run too.

I dashed by the house and grabbed Pearl and screamed out for Abigail to mind the others and fix them supper. I swear it is a thousand wonders that my young’uns had not took to calling her Mommie. I was truly blessed to have had such a fine oldest child. She, however, might not have thought she had been thusly blessed with her mommie.

I done the milking for Mary and by that time it was dark in their cabin. Mary had not lit so much as a candle, and I had to feel around on the fireboard till I found one. As it sputtered to light, I saw Larkin squatted down by her stool and he had his arm up around her shoulders and she was sort of leaning into him. It rose up in me that this was not right, but what could I say? Holler out big and loud, “You get away from there, Larkin?” I think not, even though one look at Julie’s poor stricken face surely made me want to. But I did mean for them to take note that they was not in this house alone, as much as they might want to act that way so I spoke up and my voice was big and loud. “Mary, tell me again what they said.” Larkin looked at me and said, “She’s already told us once,” and I jutted my chin out at him. He knowed better than to mess with me when my chin was out like that so he told me himself.

“Something about them being with the Buncombe County militia. They was a big-mouthed feller that kept saying something about rounding up anti-Confederates, and though Hack kept saying he weren’t against nobody they grabbed him up anyways. Said she saw Sol and Greenberry and your brother David and a bunch more and that she even saw Fee and it looked like they’d hit him in the head with something.”

As I said a while ago I had already heard this, but him repeating it had served its purpose. He got up from Mary and was just standing there with his hands hanging down.

And it is a good thing, as right about then I heard feet come pounding across the porch and Mommie come flying through the door with her hair out of its bun and I knowed she’d been caught just as her and Daddy was fixing to go to bed.

“Lord have mercy, Mary.” Mommie went to her and grabbed up
the very same hand Larkin had just been holding. “Oh, honey. Your poor hands are cold as ice.” She rubbed them between hers.

“Damn them all to hell in a handcart!” Daddy said and went to pacing back and forth. “What do they mean coming in here and pulling such a trick as this here? It’s that damn bunch from Tennessee what’s caused this.”

“Don’t blame them for this. They can’t help it.” Mommie said.

“Damned if they can’t!” Daddy was just this side of screaming.

“That bunch over on Shelton Laurel has brought the whole damn southern army down on us, sure as I’m standing here.”

Mommie rose and her back was stiff as a poker. “You hush, William Norton. Raring and raising hell ain’t going to do nobody a bit a good. You go to the spring and git me a bucket of water, and I need you to have a cool head when you come back.”

Now they had never been no doubt in my mind who was really the boss with Mommie and Daddy, but this was the very first time I had ever in my life seen it so out in the open. Mommie always took care to make sure Daddy thought he was in charge, and she could play him like a fine-tuned fiddle. I waited for a blow that never happened. Daddy’s eyes was red as blood and he was blinking and blinking and then he finally just grabbed the bucket and went storming out the door.

Mommie’s voice was calm as could be. “He’ll be all right when he gets back. He’s just hidebound as to what to do. He gets that way sometimes, bless his heart.” She handed me another candle. “Light this, Arty. It’s dark as pitch in here.”

And from then on I did not have to worry who was in charge.

Mommie turned to my baby brother Tete. “I want you to go to the house and gather up some of your things. I hoped to wait but it appears
the time for waiting is over.”

It is funny how I never even paid any attention to that one of my brothers. I was already married and gone long before he’d even been born, and I was thunderstruck to have just seen how big he had got.

“I’m sending him to Knoxville,” Mommie said. “A man that Granny Nance is friends with is taking him to Greeneville. He’ll be working with a captain in the Union army. Only way I could figure to keep him safe during this mess.” She looked Larkin right in the face. “I can send you too, if you want to go.”

Oh, how I wish I had throwed the awfulest fit in the world right then and just made him go. That is one of them moments we all look back down our lives at and know that we could’ve changed everything that was to come.

“I can’t, Aunt Nancy.” His eyes were dark and I could read nothing in them by the dim light of the candle. “I’ve got too many folks depending on me—Daisy, Arty. I can’t.”

And my heart cried out and said,
Not me, but Mary.
I looked at Mary to see if she was setting there all full of herself and felt sorry in an instant. Her poor little face looked like it had caved in on itself and bore such a look of suffering that I felt scalding tears flood my eyes. We was rowing the same boat now, Mary and me was, and I was ashamed of my feelings of a minute before.

I said nothing and simply went to peeling some shriveled up taters because that is what Mommie told me to do.

I
HAD LAID DOWN
with Pearl way up in the night just to try to rest as I knew I would not sleep, and it was just getting daylight when we heard footsteps on the porch.

Mary come up out of that chair like she’d been scalded and jerked
open the door. “Oh, Hack, Oh, Hack!” she kept saying over and over.

But the way he acted you’d have thought he’d just been out hunting. For once I think he was really trying to put our minds at ease, and especially Mary’s. “Hell, honey. I ought to git rounded up and took off more often, if this is how I’ll be treated when I get back.”

“Are you all right, son?” You could tell Daddy was just worried to death.

“Finer than frog hair.” And he grinned at all of us but I noted how pinched he looked around his eyes and then knowed for certain it was all just a big show.

“Come and eat,” Mommie said, holding his arm and all but dragging him to the table.

“All right, all right. Let me get untangled from Mary and I’ll eat. I am plumb starved, sure enough.”

It was while he was eating that he told his tale. He said they’d went along rounding up men until they had joined up with another group coming down from Shelton Laurel. They had been asked a bunch of questions, and then they had made some of them join up with the Confederacy on the spot. When it come his turn, one of the fellers had asked him if he was Andrew Chandler’s son-in-law. They had asked him to sign his name on a paper and let him come home.

I could see Daddy had went white as a sheet and he said, “Oh, God, son, what did you sign your name to?”

“And that was all?” Larkin asked.

“Well, pretty much.” Hackley would not look at Daddy. “I told them I had been planning to join up as soon as I got my crops in anyhow. They reminded me that the Conscription Act had took effect back last month and that it was the law that I sign up, so I did. Then they let me go.”

“Oh, God, help us.” Mary’s voice was barely a whisper.

“So you’ll go now?” Daddy asked.

“Nah. I won’t have to go right now. Won’t have to leave till the end of this month.” He give such a big yawn that his jaw popped. “But for right now I’m going to bed. I am wore out.”

Larkin followed him all the way to the bed.

“Hack, what about Fee?”

Hackley set down on the edge of the bed and went to pulling off his boots before he fell sideways on the bed. “They took him on. He didn’t go quiet neither. Took three of them to drag him off and that damn dog of his was absolutely trying to eat them up. They aimed to shoot it but didn’t. Finally just whistled it up and took it off, too.”

“But Fee won’t fight! Did you tell them that?”

I could tell by how cloudy his voice was that he was already half asleep. “I was having a hard enough time trying to save my own hide, Larkin. Git on, now. I’m wore slap out.”

But Larkin would not hush. “Where did they take Fee? Do you know?”

A soft snore was his only answer. Larkin made a move toward the bed, but I laid my hand on his arm. “Let him be. It don’t matter where they took Fee. He won’t stay long wherever they got him.”

A
T DAWN ON THE
last day of June, thunder shook the very house as a big storm come tearing its way over from Tennessee. Great black clouds boiled up over the highest peaks and lightning streaked down and hit a big oak tree up on the ridge. It caught fire and the flaming limbs was whipping back and forth in the wind. Fat drops of rain soon followed and the fire cracked and popped like something alive and mad as hell before it sputtered and died in the
downpour. The storm moaned and howled and then went screaming on across the ridge. By daylight it was as if it had never been, except for the water that was standing a good three inches deep on top of the ground. This was how it was on the day my brother went for the war.

I
WOULD NOT HAVE
gone over there for the world if Hack-ley had not come by the night before and asked me to. I said, “Are you sure, honey? Mary might want you to herself.” And he looked at me and said, “She’s why I’m asking you to come, Arty.” Now how could I refuse him that?

By the time I got over there him and Larkin was standing in the yard and he reached out and loved me. I loved him right back and we wound up standing with our arms around each other for a long time. He had on a fine white shirt that Mary had worked on for the past two weeks and he smelled good and clean. When he finally let go of me and I looked at his face, they was not one bit of foolishness nor devilment in the blue sky of his eyes.

“I’d rather eat shit with a splinter than to have to do this,” he said to us. “I don’t even know when I’ll be able to git back.” He give a wave all around the place. “The corn out yonder will need hoeing in two weeks or so.”

He hushed then and covered up his eyes with his hand. When he looked back at us his eyes was standing full of tears. “I got to go and ain’t no other way around it,” and then his eyes went to overflowing and I started crying, too, and of course when I done that my milk let down. You could always tell Arty in a bad situation because she’d be the one standing there with the front of her dress wet as water.

And then he looked at Larkin. “You promise me that you’ll look
about Mary, and you, Arty, have her help you with the young’uns. She loves your little Pearl and we was hoping she was—” and then he hushed again, but I knowed what he’d meant. She had told me she thought she might be expecting but I knowed now she was not.

I said I could always use help with my litter of hellions and he laughed at that, and I was proud to hear it. I did not know if I could have stood seeing him this way much longer. The tears were gone from his eyes now, but he was still talking as serious as a judge.

“Don’t let no harm come to her. Somebody come here and tries to bother her, you kill them, Larkin,” he said and did not even blink an eye.

And I said, “Why, Lord, Hackley, surely it won’t come to that.”

He looked at me. “Arty, them was some of the roughest characters I ever seen riding with them fellers last month. And that bunch that’s been hiding out on Shelton Laurel from over in Tennessee ain’t no better. You could throw every one of them in a sack, Union, Confederate, don’t make no matter mind, and you wouldn’t be able to tell which one would fall out first. They’ll be robbing, pillaging, plundering, murdering—” He looked back over his shoulder at the cabin. “And raping too. You women’ll be left to root hog or die. You’ll need to watch yourself, too, sister, and I wouldn’t let them biggest girls of yours out much neither. That’s where I’m counting on you, Larkin. I think I’ll be able to go on down that road and leave if I have your word.”