My Old True Love (9 page)

Before I could open my mouth Larkin put him in his place and did a much better, or at least quieter, job of it than I would have.

“It was not a scary thing, Hackley. I would not have missed being there for nothing in this world.”

I was about to put in my two-cents worth but did not have to,
because Mary come through the door right then and I become invisible to them both. She come across that floor a girl with a mission, and you would have had to drug me away by the hair of the head.

“I’m sorry about your Granny, Larkin.” She sounded all out of breath and I peeped a look at her and thought,
Oh, my,
because there she stood looking up at Larkin with that red hair all tousled by the wind up on the mountain and her cheeks all pinked up from the climb and the sun.

Larkin thanked her and Hackley was squirming around her like a big puppy. I thought he was going to go to pissing on the floor at any minute. But for once her attention was not on my brother. It was leveled right at Larkin.

“Sary was a fine person” was all that young’un said as she put one of them slender hands like I would never have on his arm, and I saw heat red as a flame lick its way up the back of his neck. It was a good thing Hackley was blind to everything except what concerned him and only him, or there would have been a killing right then and there. But I don’t know which one he would have killed. I looked her hard in the face and will have to say I saw no sign that she had knowledge of what she was doing to either one of them. If she had a notion she could have fooled the devil himself, for her face looked innocent as the day was long. I thought,
Arty, you must tell her,
but I did not do this until years down the road, and by then it would be too late. But we look back with vision that is crystal clear and we have no eyes whatsoever with which we can see the future.

Hackley done what he always did do, which was turn her where only he filled up her sight. He was jigging about that girl grinning like a fool. “What about me, darling Mary? She was my granny, too, you know.” Then he leaned in and I swear he nipped at her neck with his teeth.

Nobody saw it but me and Larkin, but Mary knew that we had. I know you’ve seen how a cat will scrunch itself up, tuck its head down, and its face will look all insulted. Well, let me tell you that Mary literally hissed at Hackley. She
hissed
at him. “Don’t you have no respect for me nor nobody else?” She went flouncing off, and there was that spine as stiff as a poker again.

And I have to say I had a world of admiration for that straight little narrow-shouldered back that was going out the door.

Larkin, however, was completely bewildered. “Ain’t you going after her?” he said to Hackley.

“She’ll get over it pretty quick. Then there’s the making-up part.” Hackley sort of groaned.

I told him he ought to go on after her since he appeared to be primed and ready if the front of his britches was any proof of the pudding. And he went on with his tongue dragging out on the floor. Granny always said that most men could make pure-D fools of themselves in way less time than you could bring buttermilk in a churn. I would never see nothing to prove her a liar.

T
HE MOON WAS ALREADY
riding the ridgeline of The Pilot when Larkin come to stand next to me on the porch. Everybody else was gone and I was fixing to leave. I picked out the two pines that marked the spot where Granny was spending her first night in the long time gone. I put my arm around him and snugged up close.

“Come home with me, Lark. Don’t try to stay here by yourself. You’ll just be lonesome.”

“I got to stay sometime.” He took a long breath in. “Can’t get my mind to take in that she’s really gone. I catch myself listening for her.”

My mind went back to all her things that had called out to me a
while ago. “Granny’s been a constant for all of us. I always knowed she was right here where I could git to her if I needed her.” I thought of all the times I had come up that path yonder with my ass dragging behind me, heavy-hearted with all the troubles of the world heaped on my shoulders and after being here with her for just a little bit I went back down that path with a lighter step.

Larkin must’ve been thinking my same thoughts for he said, “Granny had a way of helping you to cut through stuff.”

And we both laughed and said at the same time “Bullshit,” because that is just what she always said whenever we was taking ourselves way too serious.

Up on Graveyard Ridge, the pines went to moving in the wind.

“Bet that wind’s cold up there, Amma.”

“She is not up there to feel it, Larkin,” I said. I had never seen a more empty corpse than hers in all my life.

We were both quiet for a long time and then he said, “Where do you reckon she’s at?”

“Now, that I don’t know.” I give a wave toward that big old sky packed full of stars. “Out yonder somewheres, maybe.” And then it come to me and I patted the front of his shirt. “In here for certain.” Then I laid my hand against the side of his head. “Up here forever.”

“What about heaven?”

“Mommie would be the one to ask about that business. That’s where she would say Granny is. As for me, I don’t know what I think when it comes down to it. But I will say if they is such a place, then Granny is there with her Mommie and Pappy and her brother Josie, her children, Uncle Pete, Roscoe, your mommie. And she’s right now telling all of them about all of us. And they’s probably a big frolic going on, music being played, and old love songs being sung, and she’s right in the midst of it all.”

Then in the most pitiful voice he said, “It feels like a hole has opened up in my life, Amma. Will it ever go away?”

And though I hated to say it, I surely had to, because again I could only tell him the truth. “It won’t never go away, honey,” I said. “You will just have to figure out how to live your life around it.”

W
INTER COME ROARING IN
early that November and four inches of snow fell just a week after we’d buried Granny. Though I had begged and begged Larkin, he had stayed on at the house and had not spent a single night with us. He had come by and eat supper several times but that was all. It was during one of them times that I found out that Hackley was bringing his women to the house. Usually as soon as he finished eating Larkin would be for the door, but this one time he set at the table until even Carolina had finally give up and gone to bed. He did not want to tell me but I finally wrung it out of him and it was like twisting a groundhog out of its hole. He said that he didn’t want to go home just yet because Hackley was over there with Maggie. My eyebrows must have looked like they had took flight right off my head. I knowed what and all folks said about her, that she was trashy and loose, but I did not think that way. Maggie had hoed on her own long row.

M
AGGIE WAS THE OLDEST
of Wade and Vergie Hensley’s nine children. Her daddy was a big, barrel-chested man what laughed a lot. He had this real easy way with people, which was a good thing
since that is how he made his living. His old wagon loaded down with all sorts of things you could buy if you had the money went all over, down into South Carolina and even down into Georgia. He could tell some of the funniest tales you have ever heard in your life. I would reckon it was from him that Maggie learned that the only way to make it in this old world was to laugh about things. But now her mommie was a pure-D trick if there ever was one. And it was from her that Maggie got her cleverness, because Vergie Ray Hensley was one of the smartest people I have ever knowed in my life. I remember asking Granny one time if she was crazy and Granny laughed great big and long and then she said, “Crazy like a fox.”

T
HEY WAS NOTHING MUCH
remarkable about Vergie there at the start. She was smack in the middle with two older sisters and two younger brothers. They said all she done for the first few years was run after them two little hellions that was her brothers, neither one of which growed up to be worth killing, though that is just what happened to them both. Carl Robert was hung for stealing horses over in Tennessee and Jessie got shot in a card game down in Warm Springs. But then one night Vergie come down with a bad bellyache and by morning she was howling with pain and couldn’t even keep down water she was throwing up so bad. Granny said her nor Hattie neither one thought she’d live after that second day and Vergie’s mama, who was a big one for churchgoing, hit her knees and prayed all that next night and lo and behold, it seemed a miracle when the next morning Vergie set up and said she was hungry. They was all the big talk in church that Sunday and Vergie got attention from everybody. I mean it ain’t every day that common folks gets to see a living, breathing miracle. Even at home she was treated like the queen of
Sheba with her sisters as step-and-fetch-its and them boys was plumb cowed by her. But the days went along, and it weren’t long before things was back to normal. Vergie found out the same thing that I have—folks forget pretty quick. She was back to minding them boys in no time at all. But six weeks to the day of her first sick, she woke up with the bellyache. And this time it come with the worst headache in the world. Them sick headaches come like clockwork every six or eight weeks after that, and every time her family thought she would surely die.

By the time she was twelve, Vergie had them headaches once or twice a
week
and Granny said you could hear her screaming as you were going past the house. Said she was pitiful when they was on her bad. She couldn’t stand no light to hit her eyes and no loud noises and sometimes she’d beg somebody, anybody to cut her head off. By the time she was fourteen she was the very center of her little world and I am not faulting her people one little bit. No, I am not. It makes me mad as the devil when people get all high and mighty and say
If it was me I would do this or I would do that.
You don’t know
what
you would do if you was faced with the same thing.

Vergie figured it out, but I can’t even blame her for it either. Who don’t want to make things a little easier for themselves, is what I would like to know. She never struck a lick at nothing from then on as far as I can tell.

Granny said by the time she was fifteen Vergie was her mommie’s cross to bear and her daddy’s darling. Her daddy made her a rocking chair and she’d set out on the porch all day long just rocking back and forth and waving at folks that went past the house. She was a real pretty thing with the fairest skin and thick hair the color of a rubbed buckeye, and she talked so soft that you had to lean in close to hear
what she was saying. It was from the porch that she got her first glimpse of Wade Hensley.

She set great store by her teeth and she cleaned them religiously with a birch twig twice a day and was going after them with such a vengeance that she hadn’t even seen him come from the road to the house. As I heard it she liked to have fell out of her chair when Wade spoke to her from the yard saying he had something in his bag that would work better than the twig. She first thought he was the biggest man she’d ever seen because he had a big pack on his back. Wade was a big man and was a pretty thing, too, even when he was old, and he always went about dressed up in a suit with a vest and everything. I just loved the way they said he introduced himself to her and I have to say that if some man had done that to me I might not have married Zeke Wallin. They said he swept off his big floppy hat and said, “Wade Hensley, missy—blacksmithy, mule trader, bear trapper, liquor maker, watch repairer, log splitter, hog killer, ’coon hunter, banjor picker, and drummer, at your service.” Don’t you just love that?

He dug around in his pack for a minute and whipped out a fancy tooth-brushing contraption and handed it to Vergie. He talked and talked that first day about this being the first time he’d ever come up this far and how he usually follered the river between Asheville and Greenville, South Carolina, and how he was born and raised over in Hendersonville and how on that particular day he’d just decided to foller this road to see where it wound up.

Maggie told me that Vergie had asked him if the road had ended up there at her house and then she’d asked him which end of that tooth contraption to put in her mouth and Wade felt sorry for her. And then her daddy might as well have been one of the tribes of Israel for he was just as lost. From then on everybody felt sorry for
him
.

F
ROM OUT IN THE
yard I bet he had thought she was a young’un not more than ten year old. She was little and had the smallest feet I’ve ever seen on a woman grown. But she had great big pretty bosoms and when he got a look at them I know he did not still think her a child. Right up till the last time I laid eyes on her she could look at you with them eyes all big and round and as empty of care and trouble just like a young’un. But I bet you a nickel to a quarter it was the eye of a woman that looked Wade up and down that day and decided to have him as her own. Granny said she had culled every boy in this part of the country. Just about every one of them had tried to spark her, but she showed no interest in any of them. But once she set her mind to it, Granny said it were a sight to behold how fast she whipped out her needle and sewed Wade up.

At the end of two headache-free months, she married him, and ten months after that she had Maggie.

Everybody said Wade was a fool over Vergie, and I know that for a fact. Why, even when I was a girl and they lived right below us, he’d round that curve and be almost running for the house, he’d be so glad to see her. And she’d be right there waiting for him too. Maggie said her mommie was somebody who dearly loved the part of being married that she called a woman’s duty. We used to laugh about that ’cause me and her loved it too. Mommie had told me—and these are her own words—“Lay still, Arty, and, God willing, it will be over quick.” Well, let me tell you they was nothing quick about Zeke Wallin’s hands, nor could I be still when he took hold of me that first night. And praise be about
that.
Being a woman is hard work and the man that manages to get him a good one ought to have sense enough to use his hands gentle and slow. My friends, you cannot catch flies by pouring a big platter of vinegar but, oh, how many will flock to
just a little dab of honey. They is a real passion in most women—even a cold and selfish one like Vergie—and if you can tap into that you can stand most anything life throws at your head. Study on that for a minute or two all you men.