My Old True Love (26 page)

“Did he tell you anything to tell me before he died, Larkin?” she asked again.

He said what he’d already told her at least ten times and his voice sounded so tired but so patient with her, that I felt so sorry plumb to the bottom of my soul. “He was dead by the time I got to him, honey.”

She looked all done in, and I cast around for something that I might ask him myself. “Not even before you went to fighting?”

He looked up at me and was in such a struggle and a misery that I wished I had kept my big mouth shut. “We’d had a fuss the night before, Amma. I had not talked to him that morning.”

“Oh, God. Larkin, honey, I feel the worst in the world for you,” I said and went to them both and put my arms around them. We set there till it was daylight.

Poor, poor Mary. This was her first big loss in her life, and God knows I knew as much as anybody about grieving, and now she had a big mess of it to do.

A
ND SHE DID JUST
that and I done a lot myself over that next year. I got only a few letters from Larkin after he left, and he was doing his fair share, too.

Then just like that the war was over. It had started a way off in South Carolina and it ended a way off in Virginy, and as the hot months of the summer of 1865 went by, men what had been gone off fighting in it started to come home. You can only guess at how I searched every face hoping it to be the one I loved.

In late June, Daisy Stanton was out at the chop block shaving enough splinters from a piece of firewood to use for kindling. The evening sun was slanting in at her and had throwed her shadow up against the side of the cabin. Suddenly a great big shadow popped up right beside hers there on the house. Big John had come home.

That blackguard Shadrack Wallin knowed things would probably not go well for him back here in Sodom. The hand he’d had in the death of his brother would not be forgotten, let alone forgiven. And, yeller dog coward that he was, he didn’t have the heart to face neither Rosa nor his baby brother Zeke. He timed his homecoming with the new moon and he snuck in here and gathered his belongings and collected his wife and family, and they was gone by daylight, bound for Virginy. On the way he changed the spelling of his name to Wallen, and we never saw hide nor hair of him ever again. Good riddance to bad rubbish is what I have to say about that.

Brother William come up on Mommie at the spring and she hit her knees right there on the bank of the stream, praising the Almighty for delivering her oldest son back to her arms.

Soon after William Jr. showed back up, we heard from Robert, who was living in Mississippi with his new bride after having served out the war with the Confederacy.

Tete come home from Knoxville, where he’d been released from his duties as office clerk to General Hartwell Jackson.

Old Lawrence Allen and his cousin James Keith was afraid for their lives over the Shelton Laurel massacre. And well they should have been, for Pete McCoy had swore he would kill them. Them two made a beeline away from here and headed out for Arkansas.

• • •

T
HEN THERE WAS THEM
what did not return.

Roderick Norton, Larkin’s bearer of apple stack cake, was killed by the Home Guard while on a recruiting mission for Kirk.

Andy Chandler got better from the dysentery, went back to fighting, and was killed over at Strawberry Plains.

Little Johnny Norton deserted from Allen’s regiment and was killed in a poker game by another deserter over on Shelton Laurel.

Pete McCoy hid out on Shelton Laurel until the war ended. After his mother died in August, he headed for the western country, but made a trip to Charlotte first, where he shot and killed a man that had been with Allen’s murdering bunch on Shelton Laurel. Pete died in a dispute over a gold-mining claim in California.

But neither Zeke nor Larkin come, and I was beginning to wonder if they ever would.

O
NE WARM NIGHT TOWARD
the middle of July, I woke from a dead sleep by a rustling of the mattress as someone sat down on the foot of my bed. Quick as a cat I was up and running for the door when Zeke’s voice stopped me right where I was standing. I come back to the bed on slow feet and could hardly believe it was really him and not his haint.

“I’m home,” he said.

“I see that,” I said, but was not certain until I laid my hand on him and felt him warm beneath it.

We set for a minute with our shoulders touching.

“At night sometimes I dreamed so hard that you was next to me that I would wake in the morning with my hand closed tight like this,” I said and held up my clenched fist to him.

He closed his fingers around my little fist and raised it to his mouth
where he kissed every one of my knuckles. “I wouldn’t let myself dream, Arty,” he whispered to me. “Dreaming done me no good. Only made me long for you more.”

I palmed back a thick lock of hair from his wide forehead. His eyes was plumb purple in the light of the moon that was coming through the open door. “You won’t never have to long for me next to you again, Zeke. You ain’t never getting away from me again. I don’t ever aim to be no further away from you than I am right now.”

He laughed. “It’ll make it hard to plow joined at the hip this way.”

“There don’t need to be no plowing for a while, Zeke. Except for the plowing that needs doing right here.”

And he needed nothing else said when I patted the bed.

A
ND IN
A
UGUST
L
ARKIN
came home.

I
WAS STUDYING HIM
and he knew I was doing it. This was his third time by the house in as many weeks since he’d come home, and he was awful quiet. He’d been in the upper field with Zeke all morning, and they’d come in for dinner all hot and sweaty but easy with one another, like men can be when they’ve spent time working together. I followed them out onto the porch talking up a storm while they’d washed and poured water over their heads. Neither had said much, but then Zeke was always spare with his words. But it hurt me that the easy way I had always had with Larkin seemed gone. Even when Carolina had bounded onto the porch like a big puppy and went to poking him in the ribs and batting her eyes at him, flirting with him a little, Larkin had barely smiled. And it was hard not to laugh plumb out loud when Carolina was around. She was always cutting up and going on, slinging that big mane of glossy black hair,
with them big blue eyes just dancing with fun. Zeke had finally sent her to the spring for buttermilk just to get her out of the way.

After supper, Zeke had give me a look that was not lost on Carolina and had announced that he had a harness that needed mending, and when Larkin started to rise, he’d placed a hand on his shoulder.

“No need for you to come. Carolina’s been wanting to talk to me anyhow.” They’d gone out together, leaving me and Larkin at the table.

Larkin leaned back on the bench and looked at me. “You aiming to draw a picture of me?”

I laughed and felt a little better. “No, I ain’t, you smart-mouthed whelp, you.”

He smiled and it almost blossomed in his eyes, but not quite. “I don’t mean to worry you, Amma.”

And with that he unlocked the words that had been near about choking me to death, and I let him have it. “Well now why in the world would I be worried? Just because you don’t talk to me no more? That you act like you owed me money or something? That when you do come here to the house, you latch onto Zeke like you’re in deep water and he’s the only one about that knows how to swim? No need for me to be worried about none of that.” I had to lay my hand on him then, so I brushed the hair back from his forehead and hunkered down so I could look him eyeball to eyeball. “Or that Julie left Mary’s and went to stay with their aunt over at Jewel Hill. Or that Mary won’t speak to her mommie since Julie left. Or that Rosa told me that they ain’t been no lamps lit of an evening at your place since you come home. Or that you been seen coming from Maggie’s real early in the morning.” I took my hand away, but stayed close to him in case I needed to put it back. “No need for me to worry about none of that?”

His eyes were flat. He shook his head. “No.”

I let out my breath in a big puff and leaned back. “Well, I won’t then.” And I come up off that bench like it was red hot. His hand shot out and grabbed my arm, but I was so mad I was about to cry and would not look at him.

“It’s not as it might seem, Amma.”

That flew all over me. “How do you even know how it might seem to me, mister? You ain’t bothered to ask.”

He sighed. “I’m not a boy anymore, Amma. Can’t you see that?”

I jerked my arm loose. “Well, now that you ain’t a boy, just don’t wind up being a stupid man, Larkin.” I went to washing them dishes with a vengeance and out come that chin of mine.

After a while I heard him get up from the table and go out the door.

T
HOUGH
I
HAD
R
OSA
looking every morning for weeks after that, she never saw Larkin at Maggie’s again.

But we all saw Larkin and Mary walking out together most every evening after supper. And as the tired green of summer gave way to the bright colors of fall, I knowed that Larkin had made his choice not to be a stupid man.

They took to walking up on the mountain, and I would see them go by the house with Hack Jr. riding high up on Larkin’s shoulders. I could hear him laughing all the way down at the house. Larkin was a pure-D fool over that young’un, and from the very first he acted like he was his own flesh and blood. But let me say right here that this could not be. That child was the spitting image of my poor dead brother and became more like him the older he got. I swear it was just like looking at him. And you know mayhap that was the very reason why Larkin took such a shine to him. He loved Hackley, too.

They walked up to Hackley’s grave a lot. Mary said they was standing next to the grave and Hack Jr. was setting right on it when Larkin asked her to marry him. When she said she would, he had grabbed up both of them and had danced all over the place. I felt like something cold went to crawling right up my spine when she told me that. Somehow, even though I cannot say the why, it did not seem right that he’d asked her there.

I
OFFERED TO LET
them marry in my house, but Mary allowed that she wanted it done in the church. So off we went. Do not think I did not feel happiness in my heart for them, for I did. The only reason I offered them my house was that they was some men what had come from the damn war that carried very hard feelings. I would mention here one Tyler Ray what had been up in Virginy with Mister Lee when he’d surrendered. Tyler’s eyes would just fill up with water at the mention of that man’s name. Some on the other side was just as bad. As I have said before, and will take this opportunity to say again, men is foolish sometimes when it comes to whether their honor might be slighted in some way. So I say to them, keep your damn honor placed somewhere that it cannot be slighted. But Tyler pulled out his pistol and shot Vernon Lewis in the hand at a poker game back in the fall just for saying that the king of spades sort of reminded him of old Marse Robert. They said the cards went every which way. ’Course in my way of figuring, Vernon Lewis ought to have been shot a long time ago for being a fool, but if we start shooting folks for being fools then we’d be shooting right up till the end of time.

So when I got to the church and it was packed with folks, I got the all-overs, but I did not get them too bad. Larkin had summed it up right as we was leaving the house and, oh, let me say that my biggest boy was as pretty a man as I had ever seed in my life. He had shrugged his big wide shoulders and said to me, “The war is done, Amma. It is time we got on.”

And I had said to him something I had never said, but had meant to for a long time. “I am proud of you, son,” I said. “This is a decent thing that you are doing for Hackley here on this day.”

His voice was all choked up when he answered me. “I am not doing it for Hackley, Amma. This is all for me.”

I had nothing to say to that and figured just as he said and so it is.

T
HE MARRYING THAT DAY
went off without a single hitch, and it looked as though old grudges, slights, hurts, and more honor than you could shake a stick at had at least for this day been left outside the door. But do not fret all you people. It was all sorted out and picked right back up when that night ended.

L
ET ME TELL YOU
right now that I had never give much thought to this word
beautiful
. To me people was seldom if ever beautiful. But on this day Mary was beautiful. Her hair was all down and loose and covered her shoulders for all the world like a rich wavy red shawl. There had been no need to pinch her cheeks for color, and them big brown eyes never left Larkin’s face one single time while the preacher was talking.

Larkin stood straight and looked right back at her, and his voice was deep as a well when he said the words that bound his heart to hers.

They was those among us that shed tears setting on them hard wooden benches that morning. Mommie capped her hands over her face and just sobbed as the preacher said, “Till death do you part.” I was bawling myself and me setting there with my lap budding yet another child. I swear to you, it seemed that every time Zeke Wallin hung his britches up on the peg on the back of the door, Arty found herself in the family way. I reached out and took Zeke’s hand in mine and held onto it the whole time. I had made good as I could that threat of not letting him out of my sight. This might explain me being four months gone again. Lord, I felt so sorry for Julie, who did not sob. It would have been better if she had but only one single tear slid down her little face when Larkin said, “I do.”

I had seen Maggie at the back of the church when I’d come in and my eyebrows flew straight up. She grinned at me, and I could tell she was having a big time knowing that everybody in there was watching her. Bless her, at least this would lay to rest any ugly thoughts folks might be carrying about her and Larkin. I knowed it was him that had gone and asked her to come, and I also knowed that they had been nothing between them since he’d come home. I know this because she had come by the house the week before and we’d had us a big talk. All them times he’d come to her in the early misty mornings back in the summer, it had been only to sit with her on the porch. She said sometimes they’d talked together, but most times she’d just listened. “He’s got a world of horror in his heart, Arty. The things he has seen is bad enough to have killed most men.” He’d told her too of how he feared he was ruined now for any woman. She’d let him talk and when he run out of words, she’d let the silence be. They never once touched, though she would have, had he asked. Then he’d stopped coming. She’d let that be as well.