My Old True Love (8 page)

But they was nobody there to sass me back and tell me that Arty might not be the one in charge on that day.

G
RANNY WANTED THE DOOR
open and the light of the hunter’s moon had come dashing itself across the floor like bright-colored water and had crawled its way up in the bed with her. If you had told me that corruption would lay waste to a body the way it had Granny’s in just three months, I would have called you a dirty liar. But it had, and laying there in that bed she looked as little as one of my least girls. Larkin was setting in the doorway with his feet on the outside step. He had his elbows propped on his knees and his hands was hanging down loose between them. I almost wished that he had gone on hunting with Hackley and them boys that had stopped by here before good and dark. He looked pitiful setting there. The moon’s light laid flat on his face, and had it been a summer moon, it would have been pretty to see. But they is something about moonlight in the fall that I did not like then and do not like now. Granny had twisted and turned and fought the covers so that I was just wore out with trying to keep her covered up. From up on the ridge above the house, a panther squalled and a hen in the chicken coop answered it with a nervous chuckle. Granny opened her eyes and looked right at me.

“That would be the little hen Hattie give me two year ago. She’s a good layer and right pert for a hen anyways,” she said.

Larkin got up and drug him a chair to set next to me. The slats squeaked as he leaned forward to take her skinny little hand in his big one. He brought up the crock of white liquor we’d been keeping next to the bed. He took a sip and tilted it in her direction. “You ready for some more, Granny?”

“Pour me some and help me set up,” her voice come all whispery.

I sloshed a fair amount into a tin cup and Larkin helped her up. He looked at me and I saw his hurt plain as day. How anybody could be as little as her and still live was beyond us both. She slurped noisily from the cup. “Lay me back down now, honey. Hit makes me dizzy to set up long.”

I took the cup and looked down in it a minute, then I turned it up and drunk what was left. It burned like fire going down and I was thankful for it. My belly got all warm and I felt a little light-headed and was glad for that as well.

He eased her back onto the mattress and I pulled the quilts up and made a big do of tucking them under her chin. She’d stopped eating a week ago and I kept piling on the quilts because I couldn’t stand the thoughts of her being cold.

“Mommie will come tomorrow,” I said to Larkin.

“It’ll be too late tomorry, honey,” she whispered, staring out the door.

We never said nothing and in a little bit she said it again and her voice was a little stronger.

“I said it’ll be too late tomorry. I don’t aim to be here when the day breaks.”

And I could tell by her tone that she meant just what she said.

She dozed off, but Larkin kept on holding her hand. Of a sudden she roused up and her eyes flew open.

“Josie? Oh, Josie, look. Them cats has found the nest of baby rabbits back an under the porch. Oh, no! They’ve hurt one of ’em bad. Try to catch it. We’ll nurse it back. Damn cats!” Her hands sort of twisted around on the quilt and then were still.

Larkin leaned back hard in the chair, brought his hands up to his face, and fisted his eyes. I thought he was fixing to cry and I wanted to say to him,
This dying is hard business,
but I did not because his head nodded forward and his chin dipped toward his chest and I knowed he was asleep. I was tired myself but knew I could not sleep so I set there still as a rock and waited—for what, I did not know. A stretch of time went by and up on the mountain the big cat squalled again and I thought,
If any sound could wake the dead it would be that,
and then I felt all funny because I had even thought it. But it did wake Larkin up. We set a long while with neither of us saying a word. Then I was so glad he had not gone with them boys and left me there by myself. When Granny spoke I think it scared us both.

“Larkin, boy? Carry me out into the moonlight. I want to see it all one more time.”

I would have hated to have been the one that tried to stop him from taking her out. It was not going to be me, even if I did think it was too cold. He took her up quilts and all, ducked through the door and they was gone out into the bright of that October moon.

If I close my eyes I can still see it and it was a sight to see. He stood in the middle of all that light and it changed them both into something other than what they had been inside the house. Though I had never seen no haints I allowed as how they must look just like them
and though I knowed it was Granny and Larkin I could not help myself making an
X
over my heart.

Granny sort of sighed and said, “Ain’t many folks gits to leave this world by the light of a blue moon. Two full hunter’s moons . . .” Her eyes glowed with the light. “Sing for me, Larkin.”

“What do you want me to sing, Granny?”

“Why, my favorite,” she said.

And though his voice was soft, it was the best I would ever hear him sing “Pretty Saro.”

When I first come to this country, in 1749,
I saw many fair love’yers but I never saw mine.
I viewed all around me, saw I was quite alone
And me a poor stranger and a long ways from home.

Fare-thee-well to old mother, fare-thee-well to father, too,
I’m a-goin’ for to ramble this wide world all through,
And when I get weary, I’ll sit down and cry,
And think of my darlin Pretty Saro, my bride.

Well hit’s not this long journey I’m a-dreading for to go.
Nor the country I’m a-leavin’ nor the debts that I owe
There’s only one thing that troubles my mind,
That’s leavin’ my darlin’ Pretty Saro behind.

Well I wish’t I was a poet, an’ could write some fine hand.
I would write my love a letter that she might understand,
And I’d send hit by the waters where the islands overflow.
And I’ll think of my darlin’ wherever I go.

Well, I strove through the mountings, I strove through the main,
I strove to forget her but it was all in vain,
From the banks of old Cowhee to the mount of said brow,
Where I once’t loved her dearly, and I don’t hate her now.

Well, I wish’t I was a turtle dove had wings and could fly.
Right now to my love’yer’s lodgings tonight I’d draw nigh,
And there in her lily-white arms I would lay there all night.
And I’d watch them little windows fer the dawning of day.

“Sounded so much like my Pappy,” Granny said, and I could not help it, I started to cry. “Hush up,” she said, and her voice sounded light as the air. “You ain’t never been one to cry and carry on any such a-way.” I straightened right up at that. Then she said, “Drop the quilts, Larkin. I want to feel the wind on my arms and legs.”

“Granny, it’s cold out here. Keep the quilts on.” I don’t know why I was so worried about them quilts but it was all I could think about.

The quiet got awfully big in the long time it took her to gather up to answer. “Let them fall, Arty. Hit don’t matter no more. I feel warm as I did when I was a girl.”

And the quilts slid off and I pulled them away from his feet and stood there with them balled up in my arms. The wind come up then and lifted her hair, worried at the hem of her nightgown, and she smiled at us. “My mammy used to tell me that they was no such thing as dying. Said we really was just born twice’t. Once to this place, then again into the t’other. Said we entered both like newborn babies. And she said just like we waited for a baby to be born in this world, they’s folks waiting fer us to be born over yonder.” And her breath kept coming out and coming out, but it was only when Larkin called her name that it rose back up and her eyes opened and she stared right at me.

“You see to everything, Arty,” she said.

I had such a knot of tears in my throat that I could barely say to her, “Yes, I will.”

“Ye’ll be all right, son? Tell me.”

“I’ll be all right, Granny. I swear.”

And I said in a strangled voice, “No, oh, no.”

Her eyes moved from his face and got all dreamy as they found the moon. Suddenly her eyes got big and wide and she said, “Oh, they are all here now! Pappy!”

And with them words Sarah Elizabeth Gentry Shelton was born again.

I
T WAS FULL DAYLIGHT
when Mommie stepped up on the porch of the cabin and saw the open door. She come pounding across the porch, calling “Mama? Arty? Oh, God.”

I got up from the fireplace where I was laying a fire. “She’s gone. She went last night, or I reckon it was really this morning.”

“Oh, Lord, have mercy on her soul,” Mommie said, then she went to crying like her heart was broke. I let her cry. Sometimes that’s the best we can do for somebody, to just let them cry.

I had already sent Larkin to Greenberry’s to tell him and Sol to start charring out the coffin and on to tell Hattie to bring her corpse herbs. While we was waiting for him to get back, I told Mommie what had happened out there in the yard.

“She was looking up at the moon, but her eyes weren’t seeing no moon. They was looking far off. And then I got the feeling that the yard was full of people. They was swirling all around us just for a thought, petting her and easing her somehow. And then they was just gone. Her too.”

We just set there for a while drinking our coffee and then I said, “Well, I ain’t sure what to do next, Mommie.”

Mommie looked at me and her eyes was as dry as dust and blue as the sky and she said, “That’s all right, honey.
I
know what to do. We’ll get through it together.”

And she sounded so much like Granny I could not help it then, I started to cry.

G
RANNY HAD BURIED
P
AP
on the high ridge that looked out on the whole valley of Sodom. Mommie had fussed that it was too hard a climb and Granny had said to her, “Why, Nancy, they’ll carry me ever step of the way one of these days. I want to be planted where I can see the whole cove and be able to watch my people light the lamps in the morning and blow ’em out at night. And bury me with my shoes on ’cause if they’s any way to come back, I’m coming. And if I can’t, then what better place than up there? They ain’t no prettier place in the world.”

So we climbed. Up past the blackberry patch, dried up and withered from the early frost. Up past the big old chestnut trees with their limbs almost brushing the ground with nuts. On up past the cave and across the gully wash that held the tracks of a big panther. On up to the very spine of the ridge, where, for all of her talk about it being the prettiest place in the world, all I saw waiting for her was a lonesome hole in the ground. Everybody sung as they lowered her, but I could not. They was not a single word that found its way from my hurting heart.

We’ll camp a little while in the wilderness, in the wilderness, in
the wilderness.

We’ll camp a little while in the wilderness, and then I’m a-goin’
home.

And then I’m a-goin’ home, and then I’m a-goin’ home.

We’re all a-makin ready, oh ready. And then I’m a-goin’ home.

And then Hackley stepped right up to that dark hole that was now full of her and put his fiddle under his chin and played “Pretty Saro” and finally I felt the tears that had strangled me all morning start to let down. It was like that fiddle reached right in my throat and untangled the knot and I thought,
Bless you, Hackley.
I was not the only one. They was not a dry eye amongst us by the time he lowered the fiddle to his chest and, still playing, closed his eyes and sung it through.

Nobody said a word as the bow stroked that final note. Not a single word. Then the preacher just said, “Amen,” and the crowd give a big sigh all together and everybody started to straggle off back down the mountain. But when Larkin made to leave I said to him, “No, me and you will stay. She would not have left either one of us.” And we not only stayed, we helped Fee and them shovel in the dirt. I had kept her covered with them damn quilts and I felt it was my job to help cover her one last time.

I think the eating and mingling that goes on when somebody dies is to keep everybody from thinking about the thing their mind most wants to dwell on. That would be the person you had just put in the cold ground forever and ever because if we tried to think of all them empty days and nights to come, right then we would all go completely foolish. So we eat and talk and eat some more. Back at Granny’s house that day it were no different. Except that this time she were not there to see to things and my eyes would not stay away from her chair by the fireplace or her digging stick hanging by the door or all the things that called out to me,
Here I am, but where is she?

“S
HE WANTED YOU TOOK
care of, honey,” Mommie said to Larkin as she put out food back at the cabin. “She wanted you to have the home place and that clinches it for all of us. It’s yours.”

He stood there with the blush of a boy still on him, trying to be a man, and, oh, how my heart just broke for him. “You do not have to stay here by yourself, honey,” I said. “You come home with me.”

What he said next cut me to the quick because it were the truth. “You don’t have the room, Amma.”

I wanted to argue with him and did, but he were set against it, and I finally had to turn from him and go to helping Mommie lay out the food that kept coming and coming. I thought to myself, for a bunch of people that has no money, it is a wonder we are not all big as fattening hogs for all that we are rich in food.

Hackley come up about that time and I could not help but hear what he was saying. I swear Hackley never said the right things. But you always knew what he was thinking since that was just what he said. He was gnawing on a piece of cornbread while he talked. “I know you hated to see Granny go. But at least you can go hunting with us and stuff now.”

I felt the itch in my hand to jerk him up and just blister him like I used to do.

He went right on, though. “I guess that scared you and Arty when she up and died on you. I don’t cotton to being around no dead people.”