Olivia, Mourning (16 page)

A few minutes later Mourning drove up the hill. Long, thin, naked-looking tree trunks rested across the back of the wagon, sticking out on both sides. She had finished tying her line, but hadn’t the strength to nod or smile in his direction, let alone raise a hand to wave.

Chapter Sixteen

“You gonna help me unload, Miz Pioneer Lady?” Mourning asked. “I get the trees, you get the bark. Spread it out to dry over there on that grass. Get all them books a yours, anything heavy enough to flatten ’em out.”

He climbed down, removed his hat, and studied the sky. “They be clouds startin’ to stir up over there, but I don’t think we gonna get rain tonight.”

He pulled one of the thin tree trunks from the wagon, strode over to lean it against the cabin, and then stood watching Olivia gather up some of the pieces of bark. Shaking his head, he went to the barn and came back carrying another floppy felt hat, which he plopped on Olivia’s head.

“You can’t work in the sun without no hat. Make yourself sick. And black as a nigger.”

They worked in silence, until he emitted a loud “Arggh” as he hoisted down one of five fat stumps, each about two feet long, with flat tops and bottoms. “These be our chairs.” He patted it. “But make sure you watch out for splinters.” He grinned and wiggled his behind.

He turned the log on its side and rolled it into the cabin, then did the same with the second one. The next two he placed outside, on opposite sides of the fire pit. He chopped at the earth with his hatchet and worked the “chairs” into the ground until they no longer wobbled.

Then he rolled the last and largest of the logs off the back of the wagon and let it thud to the ground. “This be your chopping block,” he said, as he rolled it to the far side of the cabin. He stood it on end and hacked the blade of the axe into it. “I give you your first lesson tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait.”

After they finished unloading, Olivia stepped into the cabin to feed the fire and then dragged herself down to the river to scrub, rinse, and wring out the laundry. Mourning – who had been studying the roof while pacing back and forth, counting and muttering about run and rise – saw her struggling with the tub of wet clothes and hurried down to take one of the handles and help her carry it up to the clothesline.

“You know you spose to use hot water,” he said.

“Yes, I know. I know. But I can’t –”

“All right. All right. I just be saying. No need to get riled.”

Both of them were grimy, sweaty, and exhausted. Mourning sat on one of the stumps, watching Olivia hang the clothes on the line. When she finished, she sat on the stump opposite him.

“Do you want me to make coffee?” she asked.

“You best sit a bit. Catch your breath.” He closed his eyes again. Then he opened them and gave her a warm smile. “You know, Livia, you been right. I gotta say. This be a good place. We gonna be all right here, like you said.”

“I hope so.”

“Farmers always got problems. Rains too much. Don’t rain enough. Too much sun or not enough. One bad storm can wipe you out. Bugs and birds eat you out. Market go down. Seed go up. Always be things that can go wrong. But this here be real good land. Plenty a wood and water. Lot more of it clear than I ’spected.”

“I’m glad you don’t feel like strangling me.”

“Nah. I real glad I come with you. We be ready to put in some corn by the last of the month. Then wheat and some hay. We gotta clear them fields up and there be plenty of sweat in it, but like you said, we got us a good start. A real good start. You can get some vegetables in pretty quick. Fine place for your plot right over there.” He nodded toward the right side of the cabin. “Almost flat and plenty a sun. We start keeping the team there at night. Let them lay pies on that soil for a few days and then you turn it over. Plant you some cabbage and peas and onions and turnips and carrots. We be eatin’ fine by the end a summer. Just look at you – all set up your first day out, cookin’ over your own fireplace, hangin’ clothes on your own line, like you been doin’ it all your life.”

Vegetable garden. She wanted to groan. She hadn’t thought of that. What she said was, “You don’t have to sound so surprised. I told you I could.”

“Long as you know you spose to boil the laundry,” he teased and she smiled.

Every inch of her body ached to the bone and her hands were covered with brown streaks of blood. Perhaps worst of all was the way she smelled. She hadn’t known it was possible for a girl to smell that bad.

“Ain’t so many white women what ain’t dirt poor gonna do what you done today. You all right, Livia.”

She felt her face flush and realized she was more comfortable with him acting ornery. She was used to that.

“Well, I never had any doubt that
you’d
be all right.” She got up. “I’m going to put the bread in. I’ve been heating the lid like you said.”

“Oooh.” He grinned. “Your first loaf of kettle bread. Now that be a hard test to pass.”

While they were shopping in Detroit, Mourning had reminded her that they wouldn’t have a stove and bought a funny shaped pot with a concave lid, over a foot long and about half as high.

Olivia went into the cabin, where the lid to the bake kettle was heating in the edge of the fire. She punched the bread dough down and did as Mourning had told her to: put it in the kettle, set the kettle in some coals on the hearth, put the concave lid on, and filled the lid with coals. Then she went back outside.

“Mourning,” she said, her eyes on the ground, “I’d be real appreciative if you could find someplace else to be, while I clean myself up in the river. I want to have a real bath, with soap.”

He thought for a moment. “Okay. I stay in with the team. But first come in there with me.” He strode into the barn.

She followed him, wondering,
Now what? He wants to show me how to muck it out in case I get bored?

He began running his hands over the logs in the corner that faced the cabin and the river.

“Just want you to check. See that they ain’t no holes in the chinking. No way I can see out,” he said. “Check for yourself.”

“For heavens sake, I believe you,” she said, flushing to the roots of her hair, horrified by the image of him peeking through a hole at her, a possibility that never would have occurred to her.

“No, you gotta see. We both gonna be bathin’ in that river till it turn cold and you gotta be comfortable doin’ it. You ain’t gonna be, you don’t check for yourself.”

Olivia obeyed while he rummaged through his toolbox.

“Okay, I checked.”

He held up a harmonica, slapped it against his palm, and blew into it. “I’m a sit right here with my back in this corner and play. Long as you can hear me playin’, you know where I at, and you gonna feel comfortable. I can’t move nowhere without you hearin’ it. So go get all shiny.” He grinned and made a shooing motion with his hand. “And you sure need it, Miz Pioneer Lady. Grizzly bears down south in Canada been trackin’ your scent all day.”

She made a face and he began playing a halting version of “Amazing Grace.” She hurried into the cabin for her soap, a clean work dress, and a towel. The strains of Mourning’s music followed her down to the river, where she sat on the white rock and prepared to get naked for the second time that day. She grinned, remembering how modest she had always been. Even when undressing alone in her own room, with the door on the latch, she used to have her nightdress bunched up around her neck, ready to pull down, before she slipped her chemise off.
One day out here
, she thought,
and I can hardly keep my clothes on
.

When she was as clean as one can get in river water and had finished dressing, she shouted to Mourning, “You can come out.”

He approached as she was hanging her towel on the line. “Your turn now?” she asked.

“Yeah, my turn.” He held out his hand for the soap. “’Less you wanna watch, I give you a holler when I be done.” He grinned and Olivia burned red again.

He is a good man
, she thought, but this time she didn’t mean good of character. He was indeed that, but now she meant good to be with. For the first time the question “Why couldn’t he be white?” worked its way consciously into her mind.

Olivia went to check on the bread. The crust looked nice and brown, but when she turned it out of the kettle and tried to slice it, the middle was all dough. There was nothing but a plate of crusts for their supper. Now she would have to prepare something else. The beans wouldn’t do for today; they hadn’t been soaking nearly long enough to cook them. She only kept herself from crying by repeating,
Just one more thing today. Just one more
.

She fed the fire, shoveled a pile of bright embers onto the hearth, and set the long-handled frying pan in them. Then she quickly mixed up flour, water, and salt for flapjacks, adding two thinly sliced apples to the batter. When Mourning returned from cleaning up, she greeted him with a plate of thick flapjacks, surrounded by pieces of bread crust smeared with blackberry jam.

“Sorry about the bread,” she said. “I failed the test.”

“Take a while to get the hang of it,” he said as he took his plate. “And tonight I gonna eat anything you give me. My stomach been hollerin’ for me to put somethin’ in it.”

They went out to the stump chairs and sat in the dusk, eating hungrily. Olivia balanced her plate on her knees and cut ladylike pieces. Mourning found a good use for his fork – he stabbed it into the center of a flapjack and held it up so he could chomp around the edge. Olivia was tempted to do the same, but remembered reading in Godey’s Lady’s Book that it was the responsibility of the gentler sex to bring civilization to the frontier. She continued her struggle for proper table manners, but her only reward was a jam stain on her clean dress. When they were nearly finished she once again broached the subject of her mother.

“Mourning, we’re going to be here together for a long time and I’m not going to stop asking, so you might as well tell me and get it over with. What you did you mean about my father finding my mother?”

He concentrated on his food, as if he hadn’t heard her. After he swallowed his last bite, he set the plate down, raised his eyes to meet her gaze, and shook his head.

“I shudna said nothin’. I thought you knew. That you hadda know.”

“Knew what?”

“About how your mamma died.”

“How did she die?”

“What they tell you?”

She shook her head. “You tell me what happened. Everything you know. Everything.”

“All right.” He took another deep breath and said it quickly. “Your daddy come home and found her in the storeroom by your kitchen, only it ain’t been no storeroom then. Used to be the pantry.”

“Found her what? Lying there sick? Did she fall down and hurt herself?”

He stared steadily into Olivia’s eyes and said, “She been hangin’ by her neck. She throwed a rope over the beam and stood on a footstool to put it ’round her neck. Then she stepped aside. That stool been still standin’ there next to her. Your daddy come home and found her like that. He stayed real still, just staring. Seem like a long time ’fore he took her down.”

Olivia stared at the ground. She was sure no one had ever said these words to her, but even so, they didn’t feel new. Had she heard whispers and folded them away, forced herself to forget them?

“How do you know this?” she finally asked.

“I been with him. Been workin’ at the store and he aksed me to carry a sack a flour home for him. I come in the back door behind him. I knowed something wrong. Don’t know how, cause he ain’t said no word, ain’t made no noise at all. But I gone to see what wrong and seen him standin’ there starin’ at her.”

“I was almost six when she died,” Olivia said softly. “So you would have been eight or nine?”

“Sound right.”

“So maybe you didn’t understand. You could have been confused, not really understood what happened.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I ain’t been in no confusion. I know what I seen. I seen him step up on that stool and hold her, so he could slip the noose off. He aksed me to help him carry her to the parlor and lay her down. Then he been on his knees on the floor, touchin’ her face and cryin’. Cryin’ and shoutin’. ‘Why? Why? Why you wanna leave us so bad?’ Every few minutes he stop cryin’ and start hollerin’. ‘How could you do this? How dare you? Coulda been Olivia what found you. What kind a mother are you?’ Then he started cursin’ God. Never gone to church no more after that day.” He paused.

Olivia said nothing and he continued.

“I remember thinkin’, the way that stool still standin’ there . . . she done it real calm like. Made up her mind about what she gonna do and then got up on that stool and done it.”

He stopped again. After another long silence Olivia said, “You mean she could have changed her mind. All she had to do was put her foot back on the stool. She hadn’t kicked it away.”

He nodded and looked away.

She spoke softly, more to herself than him. “You’d think anyone, being choked, desperate for air . . . even then she didn’t change her mind. So she hated her life that much.”

Mourning spoke again. “I think that what hurt your daddy the most.”

Olivia spoke with an edge of bitterness. “It
should
have been me. I was usually the first one home.” She lowered her eyes, wondering why she wasn’t crying. Why she didn’t feel anything. Nothing but empty. “Do my brothers know?” she asked.