My Old True Love (5 page)

And I said, “Why, he squalled and screeched around at them singings for two, three months. Cut up and made such an ungodly racket just to draw attention to himself that Hugh had to make him hush up more than once’t. Remember?”

His voice come out all muffled against his knees. “Didn’t seem to bother Hack at all.” He give a big heaving sigh and then said, “But what if I can’t?”

Granny snorted, tugging at his hair a bit. “Can’t sing, you mean? Raise your head and look at me,” she said in her best no-foolishness voice.

Larkin looked up and my breath caught in my throat. He’d been crying and I thought,
Oh, honey, bless your heart.

“Son, do you recall me ever lying to you?” Granny said in the softest voice I’d ever heard her use.

He shook his head.

“Then believe me when I tell you that this will pass. Time takes care of most things and hit’ll take care of this.”

She got down on her knees right in front of him and pulled him straight into her arms. She rocked him like a baby, singing to him the
whole time. He let her do it too. And I stood there rocking Sylvaney and my milk let down and wet the front of my dress.

When she was done he pulled back and said, “What song was that, Granny?”

“Pappy called it ‘The Blackest Crow.’” She smiled.

I said, “Aunt Vesty said it were ‘My Dearest Dear.’ Pretty, ain’t it? You ought to sing it.”

He said, “That’s easy for you to say. But I can’t.” And he drawed his knees up and pushed his face back between them.

Now I’d had enough and I said so.

But Granny said, “You hush, Arty, and go set down over yonder and feed Sylvaney.”

And I went because she told me to and felt foolish in the doing of it. Me a mommie four times and I turned right around like a slip of a young’un and set down.

“You will, Larkin. Don’t quit trying. It’ll come.” When she went to get up her knees popped like a gunshot. “I promised you, didn’t I?”

I reckon he needed something. So he held tight to her words as summer give way to fall.

E
VERY
O
CTOBER ME AND
Zeke had a frolic at our house. He was a fine banjo picker and loved to make music. We’d move all the furniture out into the yard so we could have lots of room for the dancing, which I loved to do. I will have to say that I was light on my feet and turned many a head when I hit the floor. I went by Granny’s the night before to make sure they was coming. Truth be known, I wanted to eyeball Larkin. He hadn’t come by the house in ages and my mind kept turning to him, worrying about him. And I do not
worry well. I am as bad as a man to want to fix things.

W
HEN I WENT IN
the door Granny was mending a shirt by the light of the fire and Larkin was setting on the floor beside her. She lapped the shirt and leaned forward to spit in the fireplace. “Look what the cats drug in,” she said, but I could tell she was glad to see me. Larkin never even looked up, just stared on like they was some big exciting thing other than the fire going on in the fireplace.

Me and Granny talked about this and that and when I just couldn’t stand it no more, I asked both of them if they was coming to the frolic. But I was talking mostly to Larkin and he was the one that answered.

“No,” he said.

I flew mad and opened my mouth to say something mean, but Granny stood of a sudden and set herself right down on the floor beside him. They was nothing then for me to do but set down on the other side. We set a while and the only sound was the hissing of the fire. Then Granny said in an easy, talky voice, and she did not even look at Larkin, “I was trying to remember the words to a love song yesterday,” and then she stopped and never said nothing for a long time. I knowed she wanted Larkin to say the words but I can be right impatient at times and this was one of them. She give me a quick frown when I started talking but I was already in it now.

“Which song? I can’t believe you’ve forgot words to a song.”

She was still frowning at me when she started to hum the tune. I recognized it right off but knew better than to say anything else. I didn’t even have Sylvaney to nurse this time and figured she’d just run me off.

“Yes, Arty,” she said and her voice was not sweet when she spoke my name. “It is bad when ye get to where ye can’t remember words
you’ve knowed for seventy years.” She began humming, stopped, shook her head.

“Real fine song, ‘Pretty Peggy-o.’ Recall the tune just fine, but the words don’t come.” She started up a low humming and started to sing. I was shocked at how phlegmy and coarse her voice was and tried to remember if it had sounded like this back in the summer and realized with a certain sadness that yes, it had been just this way.

Come a-trippin’ down the stairs, Pretty Peggy-o
Come a-trippin’ down the stairs, Pretty Peggy-o

She stopped. “That ain’t right.”

“That’s the third verse,” Larkin spoke like he just couldn’t help himself. “First one starts out, ‘As we marched down to Fennary-o.’”

I nodded. “That’s right.”

The fire gave a mighty crack, and a red chunk of wood shot out. Granny slapped it onto the hearthrock with her hand and at the same time give me such a look as would have shut the lying mouth of Satan himself.

“Saddens me to think I’ve forgot one of Pappy’s favorites.” She sucked in a big chest full of air and puffed out her cheeks when she breathed out, as she was wont to do. “Sing it for me.”

Larkin’s eyes went back to watching that miserable fire.

“You know I can’t sing no more. Voice won’t do a thing I want it to. Breaks and wobbles around. Sounds sometimes like a girl’s.”

Granny give a big snort. “My voice ain’t likely to grace no stages neither, and I ain’t gonna git mine back. This singing ain’t about purty voices, nohow.” She reached out and grabbed his chin, made him look at her. “It’s the story what’s important, Larkin, not how purty you sing it.”

Something moved in his eyes. Whatever it was, it wrenched my heart and I would have said something but I did not and was later glad that I held my tongue, which, as you have probably figured by now, could be sometimes sharp.

“Sing it.” She weren’t ordering him to do it, she was pleading with him. “For me.”

Finally he began to sing in a low, soft voice.

As we marched down to Fennary-o
As we marched down to Fennary-o
Our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove
And they called her name Pretty Peggy-o.

And though his voice was uncertain, cracked at times, bounced back and forth between that of man and child, we both could hear what it would become. Granny began to cry and it was this that was his undoing.

“Granny?” he said, coming up on his knees.

She laid the rock hard palm of her hand right on his cheek. “My Pappy has been gone from this world for nigh on sixty years now. I told ye a while ago that I can’t remember much a’tall, and that was the truth. They’s times when I’m hard pressed to recall Pappy’s dear old face, try as I might. But just now, while you was singing, his face come to me so sharp and clear it near about took my breath away. It were your singing, child. You sounded just like him.”

“I’m sorry, Granny.”

Now Granny was staring at the fire, but she turned from it and looked him right in the face and her face just beamed. “Oh, Larkin, honey, it were a good thing. Just fer a minute I had my Pappy back. Ye give me something just now that I never thought I’d hear ever
again.” Her bright eyes moved around the cabin then came back to him. “When you’re young it’s hard to believe when somebody dies that they are gone forever, Larkin. You got nothing to lay forever out next to, nothing to measure it against.” Granny hitched a bony shoulder. “You don’t even know what you’ll miss about them. Oh, you have some notion, I reckon. You figure you’ll miss seeing them everyday, stuff like that. But, ye’ve no idea about them little things—Pappy was deaf in one ear and had a way of turning his good ear toward whoever was talking, sort of cocked his head to one side. He was a big man, and when he walked his feet would slap against the floor real heavy-like. Couldn’t sneak up on nothing, that’s why he had to be such a good shot with a gun. And, law how he’d laugh. Big booming sound. Why, he’d get so tickled sometimes that his eyes would just pour the water. And he was hot-natured and whenever he’s out working he’d sweat enough fer two men. He’d cuss them gnats something fierce.” And though her eyes were pouring water she laughed plumb out loud. “Called ’em dog-pecker gnats.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed too, and so did Larkin.

Then she said, “I never knowed how quiet my world would be without him in it.”

Larkin spread his fingers in a gesture of awkward compassion. “Granny, I—” he began.

“Shhh. I’m studying about things, Larkin. Leave it be.”

I
KNOW THIS MIGHT
sound funny, but what I remember most about that winter was how quiet it was. Always before, and I really do mean most of the time—and especially in the cold weather when sound carried best—you could hear Hackley or Larkin, and usually both, singing all over the cove. But Hackley had set in to some
serious sparking with Mary, and though I’d bet you a hundred dollars that if Larkin was trying to sing, he was not doing it where anybody could hear him. He drug around like a whupped dog as Christmas come and went and a new year started. Though I felt sorry for him, it got to where I could not hardly stand to be around him. Granny said it didn’t seem to be hurting how much he could eat, which I witnessed firsthand when he come by the house to help Zeke slaughter a shoat that got its head hung between the bars of the hogpen and choked itself. He could flat put it away and was getting way tall and his shoulders was broadening up. He was going to be a pretty thing, but God, he was not pretty now. He slinked around looking like death warmed over, all hunched up and pulled in on himself, never looking nowhere but at the ground. I just wanted to wring a chunk out of him and say,
Larkin Stanton, you straighten up,
or something along them lines. But Zeke told me to let him be, that he’d come along, and I could only believe him since I had no experience at being a big boy. And it was not that I did not already have my hands full of young’uns and work, work, work. I was proud to see spring come on and then the summer, even though it brought biting flies, more fleas, and bloodsucking ticks. I could slap flies, pinch fleas, and pull ticks off. At least now I could work outside and get out of that cabin that got smaller and smaller every year.

M
E AND
G
RANNY WAS
hoeing corn up in the Jimmy Field one day that was hot as Satan’s house cat. The air was so heavy I swear you could’ve wrung water from it like wringing out a dishrag. I had this banjo tune stuck in my head that Zeke had played the night before and that always drove me crazy. He said it was “George Booker” and I wished I could’ve gotten my hands on old George. I’d
have killed him as dead as a hammer. Of a sudden Granny stopped hoeing and cocked her head. She was one row down from me and I had been having to really bust it to stay out in front of her so as not to backtrash her row. When she leaned on her hoe you can bet I leaned on mine, too. Granny could hoe most folks plumb out of the field, but not me, and it was with some pride that I’d taken the upper row. But I reckon pride does really goeth before a fall as I felt like I was going to fall up at any minute. “What’s the matter?” I hollered and she waved a you-need-to-hush hand at me, which I did. I heard nothing but the very first of the frost bugs starting to sing out in the oaks and then it come to me, almost like a whisper. Larkin was singing. And though he was not singing big and loud, he would have had to be singing a little loud since we could hear him from where he was up in the Dave Newground. Well, I knowed then for sure that the high pure voice of the boy was gone. And then he really let loose and the flesh pebbled up on my arms.

My dearest dear, the time draws near when you and I must part.

And no one knows the inner grief of my poor aching heart,

Or what I’ve suffered for your sake, the one I love so dear.

I wish’t that I could go with you, or you might tarry here.

I wish’t your breast was made of glass, and in it I’d behold

My name in secret I would write, in letters of bright gold.

My name in secret I would write, believe me when I say

You are the one that I’ll love best unto my dying day.

And when you’re on some distant shore, think on your absent
friend

And when the wind blows high and clear, a line to me pray send.

And when the wind blows high and clear, pray send it, love, to me

So I might know by your hand-write how times has gone with
thee.

And I knew he was
in
that song. Who knows what had gone on in his head to put him in it, but he was there. I know what was in my head, though, standing there in that hot field with Granny grinning like a mule eating saw briers right below me and this black cloud of gnats dancing a jig right in front of my eyes. And I swear I felt like somebody had took their fist and hit me square in the belly and I almost doubled up. Of a sudden I was in that song too and really knew it for the first time. They was coming a time when all of us would live in a world that Granny did not and I could not help it. I started to cry and Granny must have thought I was doing that because he was singing again. And she said, “Lord, it is really just like hearing Pappy again.” And I commenced to hoeing because I could not for the life of me say a word to her.

T
HEY WAS NEVER A
time when something was not happening with them boys. And I will not call them men, even though Larkin was fifteen and Hackley was almost nineteen. They is some men that will always be boys, and Hackley was one of them. Some of that, bless his heart, was the way his history wrote itself, but my guess is he would have always been that way. Though Larkin was big as a skinned mule, he acted like nothing but the young bull that he was. I swear him and Hackley had two or three fistfights a week back then. Not with each other all the time, though they did have one or two when Larkin either beat hell out of Hackley or he would let Hackley whup him ’cause he felt sorry for him, because it
was not
in Hackley to quit. One time they got into it down at the store and Larkin hit Hackley so hard both his feet come off the ground and he went over the bank right into the branch. Then here he come back and Larkin knocked him over the bank again and again here he come back. He done that four times and every time Larkin would say, “Stay down, Hackley,” but Hackley would not. Finally Clee Buck-ner took ahold of Hackley and held his feet off the ground till he calmed down enough to be set down. And as soon as he was turned
loose, don’t you know that he went right back at Larkin. I saw the look on Hackley’s face then and knowed what had to be, so I hollered out, “You’re going to have to put him down, Larkin.” And that time when he hit Hackley he went down like you’d throwed a sack of flour on the floor. It is a good thing for them both that they did not get into it often.