My Old True Love (19 page)

I
T WAS JUST ME
and Larkin went back to that empty house.

We spent the next two days scrubbing it down. Mommie’s brother had died of the fever and she had almost died herself, and she said Granny washed everything with lye soap after. I went at it with a vengeance and by the next day, all the skin on my hands was cracked and bleeding. I did not even so much as pay that no mind. The pain in my hands was good because it made me know that at least on the outside I was still alive.

On the second night, Larkin went to the barn and got a jug of liquor that Sol had give him. I got as drunk as a hooty owl, and I will say that is exactly what I set out to do. Granny told me one time that pitching a big drunk is the best cleaning out we can offer to ourselves, so I took her at her word. I do not remember much about that night nor the next day. I got up on the fourth day weak and shaking but clearheaded and knowing I had to get on with things now. I had buried two of my babies but I still had five in the world of the living.

They come in like little scared rabbits. Even Carolina was quiet and big-eyed. Pearl had growed but she reached for me like I was a long-lost friend and I grabbed a hold of her and held her so tight in my arms that I could feel her little heart beating next to mine. When I finally set her down she come right back up off that floor and walked. Abigail give a little grin, like she didn’t know whether she ought to or not, and said she started walking about a week ago. And I was struck by something right then that I have never forgot. All my other young’uns would grow and change and all that, but Sylvaney and Ingabo would always stay my little girls.

Somehow that made it a little easier to bear.

It was just then that a soft little hint of a breeze blowed its way in through the door and the sweet smell of lilacs come sighing into the
room. Larkin’s head come up and he sniffed the air and the corners of his mouth curled up in a smile. Pearl set into laughing and she went to reaching out her little arms just like somebody was standing there to pick her up. My hair was damp with sweat and of a sudden, it felt like a hand had laid itself on my forehead to push it back. And then it seemed like it went to moving about the room stirring around and about all of them, and then it settled on Larkin. His hair blowed about for a little bit and then it was gone. Abigail scooped up Pearl and all the young’uns went running out. And I stood there for a minute with my mouth hanging open and then I started to cry, and it were not a half-crazy crying neither. It was a good cleansing cry.

Larkin put his hand on me and I turned into him and buried my face in the front of his shirt.

“It felt like she moved through me,” I said, and I pushed my face into his shirt again and breathed in.

“The smell is all over you,” he said.

I had never had such a feeling of peace in my life as when that happened. Nothing will ever make me believe anything other than that Granny come to let me know that my girls was with her and that they was all right.

And though I have missed them and wondered about them, I have never worried about them since.

T
HE FIRST CONFEDERATE BUNCH
come foraging five days later, and damn them for the blackguards they was. We were expecting them too. They was talk all through this part of the world then as to how they would come prancing right onto a body’s land demanding part of what little food there was without so much as a fare-thee-well, talking their big talk as to how a law had been passed giving them the right to take 10 percent of everything we had managed to coax up out of the ground. Well, to hell with them and their laws, and I told them that. I asked them if they somehow thought I had took them to raise, but it done no good. They took it anyhow and we come damn near to starving that winter. I still get mad as fire just thinking about how they all treated us back during their big fine war.

They went to Mary’s the day after they come to my place and this is how she told it to me. And she left nothing out, bless her.

She didn’t have much and she allowed if they got it they was going to have to fight her for it. I can just see her little slender frame standing up to all them big rough men. But stand up to them she did. She said the horses was all spattered with mud, and the men was covered with a silvery coat of fine dust. Ain’t it funny what your mind
latches onto to remember in times like that? Before she could open her mouth one of them kicked his horse out a little further than the others and he touched the brim of his hat.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” he said in a slow drawl that fingered him as being from further south than North Carolina.

Mary was not about to let them know how scared she was, but her knees was knocking under her dress. “Howdy.”

Then he give a little smile and Mary said that flew all over her, and before she could catch it that redheaded temper popped out and of a sudden she was no longer scared. She was mad as hell.

“Is they something you think is funny here?”

And he sobered right up and said, “No ma’am. I’ve not found humor in much these last few days. Is your husband around?”

“My husband is off fighting in this damn war, mister, and he’s on the same side as you.”

Mary said there was a little flicker of something that went across his face, but that did not stop him from saying, “My men are thirsty and hungry,” as if that had anything a’tall to do with her.

She answered them better than I would have. “The spring’s out yonder. Ye can help yourself. Don’t take the horses down in it. They can drink from the branch out yonder behind the barn.”

He looked her right in the face then and said, “And we’ll be needing food, too, ma’am.”

She looked right back and said, “They ain’t no food to spare for you, mister,” which was the total truth.

His voice was awful quiet then. “Ma’am, I am authorized by the government to collect ten percent of all food growed on your land.”

And Mary put it right back to him. “Well, the government ain’t setting here in Sodom trying to figure out how it’s going to make it
through the coming months without starving to death. And besides that, ten percent of nothing is still nothing.”

You know what I have to say about that, don’t you? I say, “Go it, Mary.” I told her that then, too.

But it done no good, because all he said was, “I’ll take all that into consideration while we look about. Men, see what you can find.”

The men all got down and set into roaming free about the place and Mary said she was so dismayed that she just stood there like she’d took root. The sound of a pistol shot out back of the house unrooted her, though, and she come off that porch like a screeching hellcat. “Don’t you kill my chickens. You stop.” Wailing like a banshee she launched herself at one of the men what come carrying a chicken and a sack of salt, and they both went down in a flurry.

She had no way of knowing that Larkin had just topped the ridge heading from my place to hers and he was just in time to hear her scream.

He told me later that all he saw was her setting on the ground with this feller looming up over her so he acted before he even had time to think. He went in low and caught the soldier unaware and hit him full force. The next thing he knowed he was flat on his back and the soldier was setting astraddle of his chest with a knife blade at his throat. That was awfully hard for me to believe because they come no tougher than Larkin Stanton, but Mary and Larkin both swore it as the truth. Larkin said this feller’s eyes was mild as mud pies as he studied him for a minute.

Then he said, “Catch your breath, son, then you can tell me why you come tearing in here intent on knocking the infernal hell out of me.”

Mary had crawled over to them by then and said, “Don’t you hurt him. Take everything I got but don’t hurt him.”

The soldier looked at them and then said in the tiredest voice ever was, “Oh, honey, I’m not going to take everything. I’m just going to take what the government says I can.” And then he hollered out for them other soldiers to put their guns away, and Larkin said that was when he noticed that they was about fifteen guns pointed right at his head.

Once the rest of them had gone back to their pillaging and plundering, the soldier got up off Larkin and offered his hand to Mary. “Now I’ll get back to what I was doing awhile ago,” and he helped her get up. Larkin said he felt pretty damn foolish then.

Mary said while she was knocking the salt and dirt off herself, the soldier stuck his hand out to Larkin and said, “Major Silas McMahan,” and him and Larkin shook hands. Men are the funniest creatures. Fighting like dogs one minute then shaking hands and grab-assing the next.

He then turned to Mary and held out his hand, and when she give him hers he bowed over it. I wished I could have seen all that as it would have surely been a sight to see. “Please accept my sincerest apologies,” he said.

And Mary said he was the sweetest man ever was. I did not believe it at the time but once I myself got to know Silas, I have to say he was one of the most decent humans I would ever know. He’d been a soldier all his life and had come close to losing his leg down in Mexico. That’s why he weren’t off fighting up where the big fighting was. He was from down in Central, South Carolina, and his family had been there since God’s dog was just a pup and he told me us mountain folks was as foreign to him as anybody he’d ever seen and he had traveled all over. But I’ll tell you this much. I don’t know what we would have done during that damn war without Silas McMahan.

He took only a little that day from Mary and said he was sorry for having to take that.

Poor little Mary said to me later that she had studied about it and come to where it was all right since it might help them feed Hackley, wherever he was.

Knowing my brother she didn’t need to worry about that.

Larkin said that Silas told him before he rode off that no woman was safe living by herself. Well, don’t that take all. What do you reckon they was thinking when they started their merry little war and took off all our menfolk, is what I’d like to know.

But the one thing Silas done that day without even meaning to was to give Larkin and Mary the go-ahead to get closer to the line than ever before.

And what happened next put them over it.

I
T WAS LONG AFTER
when Larkin told me the whole of what happened a few weeks later, the day the Union soldiers rode up to the house.

Larkin was out watering what corn they had managed to save when he heard horses coming up the road. He didn’t want to draw notice to the corn so he went slipping out of the field and into the barn, thankful that Hackley had butted it up against some trees because he was able to get the cow out and tied up back in the woods without being seen. He eased back and peeped between the logs. He said what he saw caused his blood to run cold as ice. He said it was all in the way them men got off their horses at the same time and started meandering toward the house that caused him alarm. He said he was desperate for a weapon of some sort when his eyes fell on Hackley’s big mowing scythe. What he aimed to do with a scythe
against guns is well beyond my way of figuring, but then I reckon at least it made him feel like he was fixing to do
something
other than just stand there with his teeth in his mouth. I shudder to think what might have happened had it not been for one of Daddy’s razorback shoats. Larkin said he heard a snuffling sound and from out of the stall nearest him come this pig just sauntering along like it had not a care in the world, and I don’t reckon it did. Them hogs was as mean as old billy hell and feared neither man nor beast. It must’ve thought kingdom come when Larkin slapped it on the hind end with the flat of that blade. He said it went squealing for all its might out of the barn and went hell bent for leather straight at them soldiers. One pulled his gun and shot it right between the eyes. Larkin said they loaded it up and went riding off.

That was how the story went for years. Later I got to hear the rest of it.

A
FTER THEM MEN LEFT
, Mary went to pieces and Larkin done what he always did. He went to comforting her and they wound up in each other’s arms. He said when they kissed he felt like he’d been struck by lightning, and it was like his skin was on fire. He said when he come to his senses he tried to shift away from her, but she’d moved with him and pushed against him even closer. And that she’d whispered his name and he was lost. Had it not been for Granny’s little hen flying out from under the house, they is no telling what would’ve happened, but fly out she did, and it scared the livelong hell out of them. He had tried to say he was sorry then, but she would not let him. “Hush,” she had said and then run into the house. He said he’d gone to the barn then and cried like a big baby. And he said to me then, “Amma, I am shamed by it still and I am sorry from the bottom of my
heart.”

When we are young we might have a bushel of sense but we ain’t got a lick of reasoning. We have feelings and yearnings, and to deny them is not natural. I will even go so far as to say we cannot deny them. Even you old people can surely recall what it felt like to wake up in the morning next to the one you love with your skin buzzing and sizzling like fatback in a hot skillet and your heart feeling like it would bust wide open with the wants and longings that is ours when we’re in the bloom of youth. Recall how it dropped itself in your gut and went to rippling all through you in the blink of an eye? It washed over me with Zeke and I have never knowed it with any other man, and I was a lucky woman because he felt it for me, too. He give as good as he got. And let me tell you right now, he got a lot. We had many years of strong nature between us and when it began to wane, we still had the memory of it and every once in a while it would flare between us and we would act like young’uns again, if only for a little while. Let me say here how much I thought of that man who was my great love and my best friend. He was my heart’s desire until the day he died and remains so even now that he is gone. This is so.

Now to think that strong nature is only between a man and his wife is a foolish, foolish thing. Larkin Stanton had no more reasoning when it come to Mary than any other man-creature on God’s green earth. He was seventeen year old and had a healthy dose of man nature and them Stantons was hot-natured men, if you know what I mean. She was a nineteen-year-old vision of pure loveliness with a healthy dose of the woman nature. And then you have to throw in that pot the fact that Larkin had loved her most of his life in one way or another. It seemed like he’d climbed on a bullet when he was born and his whole life was headed in her direction like he’d been shot out
of a gun.