One Foot in Eden (10 page)

I raised mine as well and felt the steam of it on my face. I took a sip and felt it slide down my throat and warm all over where the cold had crept into me. I couldn’t help but shut my eyes a minute and savor that comforting.

‘So what fetches you to my door?’ Widow Glendower asked. I didn’t dawdle with my words. I’d already walked too far and lived with it too long not to take the short path.

‘Doctor Wilkins, he says me and Billy can’t have a young one. I gave myself a thought you might could help us.’

Widow Glendower leveled her gray eyes on mine. They was old eyes but clear and steady. I reckoned they could still see most everything they wanted to.

‘I know a few things no town-doctor knows,’ she said. ‘Is it you or your man got the problem?’

‘It’s Billy.’

Widow Glendower looked into the fire.

‘There’s things that might could help,’ she said. ‘But let’s drink our coffee first.’

So we sipped our coffee and stared at the fire, neither me or her offering up a word till we finished. That’s the devil’s tongue reaching up out of hell, my Grandma had said of hearth-flames when I was growing up. I wasn’t wanting to mull on such a thing now.

Widow Glendower laid our empty cups on the fire-board. She walked into the back room and got a poke, then went over to the trunk. She talked at herself while she grabbled around inside, stopping to put some one thing or another in the poke.

‘There’s bloodroot and mandrake root, some sang too,’ she said, handing me the poke. ‘Brew up a tea with them for your man.’

‘What if that ain’t the thing for to make it take?’

‘Come planting time wait for a waxing moon. Take every stitch of clothes off and lay down with him in a field that’s fresh seeded. I reckon you exact what I mean by laying down with him.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ I said, and I felt my face blush up red as a moonseed berry.

I knew it to be getting darksome soon. I needed to be headed back home but I wanted something more certain sure than roots and laying down in fields.

‘I’ve heard it told you know what hasn’t yet been,’ I said.

Widow Glendower stared at the flames like she was reading them.

‘I’ve saw things that come to pass, things that someday will. I’ve saw a time when the dead will raise from their graves, a time the river will drown this whole valley.’

She looked at me and smiled.

‘But you ain’t wanting to ponder such things as that right now. You want to know if you’ll birth a young one.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘I believe you will.’

Widow Glendower got up from her chair.

‘You best be getting toward home, girl. There’s little enough light left to get you there.’

I reached my hand around my dress pocket till I fished out a dollar.

‘I brung this for to pay with,’ I said.

Widow Glendower shook her head.

‘I don’t want your money,’ she said. ‘You buy that baby of yours a play-pretty with that dollar.’

‘Well, I thank you,’ I said and left her there on the porch.

I stepped pretty lively the way back down to the river for that old woman had gave me a pail-f of hope when I’d had but a dry well before. It was the shank of evening. The sky was gray and sleety looking but the world somehow seemed brighter. I took more notice at the liveness you could find if you kept your eyes searching for it, not just the mistletoe in the big oaks but a hemlock or white pine deep off in the woods, the Christmas ferns and hairy-cat moss on Wolf Creek’s banks and the ground pine poking out from dead leaves.

I was halfway home when it happened. A shadow came over me and then a shiver so deep down in my bones it could be but one thing. I looked up. No cloud passed overhead, not even a hawk or crow, and I knew somebody had crossed over my grave. Don’t go to dwelling on death, think about new life, I told myself. I tightened the shawl around my neck and walked on.

It was coming dark when I passed near the Winchesters’ house. Through the window I could see Holland and his momma eating their supper. I’d passed words with Mrs. Winchester a few times but never a word with Holland.

‘It’s best to stay clear of Holland Winchester,’ Billy had said soon as Holland got back from the war. ‘He’s never been nothing but trouble.’

So I had, making sure I did my house chores when he worked next to our land. But as I did my sweeping and such I’d peek a look at him through the curtains. He was a big-muscled man, a man many another wouldn’t want to cross words with, but he wasn’t as rough-looking as I’d of thought to hear how others spoke of him. There was some handsome in his features and I wondered why some girl hadn’t made him a husband. But then I reckoned Holland wasn’t a settling-down kind of man.

‘Where you been off to?’ Billy fretted when I stepped through the door. ‘A plate of food ought not be asking too much after I’ve been in the fields all day.’

I told him where I’d been and the why.

‘Had to make sure that old woman hadn’t missed the gossip about me not able to seed you,’ Billy said all spiteful-like. ‘Afraid there might be a soul in Jocassee didn’t know.’

‘She maybe can help us, Billy,’ I said. ‘She gave me roots to make a tea.’

‘I ain’t seeing how some yarbing could make a difference, especially from what Doctor Wilkins told us,’ Billy said.

‘It wouldn’t likely hurt us to try,’ I said. ‘You could at least hear me out.’

There was some moody in my voice too. It was like our words was clouds gathering up for a storm.

‘It’ll do no good. I’m certain sure of that,’ Billy said.

Yet he listened and that argued much as anything that he was as wanting of a baby as I was. I showed him the roots and he drank the tea I made from them each morning and night with no fuss. When spring came we laid down naked under the waxing moon.

Those nights Billy tried to plant his seed in me I watched the moon round up and swell like I hoped my belly would. I wished on that moon like it had been a shooting star or the luckiest rabbit’s foot. There in that field with the dirt and dew cold on our skin me and Billy clinged and shivered against one another like we was caught in a flood and holding on each other to keep from getting swept away. It seemed things had gotten about that despairing for us. If they hadn’t we wouldn’t have been in that field doing what we was doing.

Come the turn of the calendar when it was near my time of the month, me and Billy got more silent than usual around each other, not just our words but things like dropping a piece of firewood in the hearth or slamming the door. We walked soft like we had us a sleeping baby already. Me and Billy somehow notioned if we was quiet and careful enough it would help that new life take root. But the curse came each month anyway and that’s what it was, a curse. A curse on me and Billy, a curse on our marriage.

Each time my blood flowed it seemed it was our hearts’ blood that was flowing, like our hearts that had once swelled so full of love for one another was shriveling like tomatoes in a drought. We went on about our lives, Billy out in the fields, me doing what needed to be done around the house and barn. There’d been a time when we’d get lonesome for one another and make up a reason for him to come back to the house or me to join him in the field.

‘Would it be much bother to help me fetch some water?’ I’d ask.

Or maybe Billy would call me out to the field.

‘Look here,’ he’d say, and show me a garnet or arrowhead. But we kept our distance most all the day now. For the first time since me and Billy had lived here that farm was a lonesome place. When we sat down for supper the food always seemed cold and leftover though I’d just spooned it off the stove. We’d be wore down from the day’s work but it wasn’t that good tired you get when you reckon your work realizes some good for another besides yourself.

It was April when I walked back up Wolf Creek. All around me the land smelled bright and newborn. Dogwood blossoms brighted up the woods and beard tongue and trout lilies made the path like the prettiest necklace. Red birds and robins sang from branches next to their nests. New life looked to be everywhere but in my belly.

The dog didn’t bark this time, just sat on its haunches like it remembered me, then sauntered into the woods. Smoke curled out of the chimney but when I knocked on the door there wasn’t no answer. I sat down on the porch and waited, smelling the primroses that bloomed next to the steps.

Widow Glendower finally came back, toting a poke bulged out with what I figured to be roots. When I stood up her eyes fell full on my belly. She stepped closer and rubbed the flat of her hand where her eyes had been looking.

‘So it didn’t take,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice that made me wonder if she ever thought it would. She shuffled past me with the poke still in her hand.

‘Come in the house,’ she said, so I followed her. She laid the poke beside the ash wood chest and told me to have a sit in the same split-cane chair I had last time. Widow Glendower took the copper kettle from the hearth and went into the back room. She came back directly with the same tin cups as last time.

She put the coffee in my hands and sat down in the other chair.

‘Taste of it,’ she said, and I wanted to pinch myself. Everything done or said was the exact as in January and I felt I was snagged up in a dream or a memory and somehow or another it was like it was Widow Glendower’s dream more than mine. I didn’t find that feeling a bit settling and I gave a heavy sort of thought to putting that coffee down and getting clear of that cabin once and forever.

But I didn’t. I took a sip of the coffee, felt its warming all the way to my belly, a belly where no new life waxed. I started tearing up then. All of everything that had happened and not happened in the last couple of years raised up in me like spring rains. It was a hopeless kind of tears, like what you’d shed at a wake or graveyard.

‘There ain’t nothing to be done about it, is there?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer at first. She sipped her coffee and looked into the fire like she was mulling something over.

‘There’s a thing to be done,’ Widow Glendower finally said. ‘A simple thing if you have want enough to do it.’

‘I’ll do any or everything to get a baby.’

‘Will you now,’ she said, like she doubted me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then it’s a easy thing, easy enough you should have figured it out your own self.’

Widow Glendower wasn’t looking at the fire no more. She was looking flush at me.

‘You got a man who can’t give you a baby, so you got to lay down with a man who can, and the man who can give you that baby ain’t no farther from you than the next farm.’

You’re a terrible old woman to say such a thing, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.

‘I couldn’t never do something like that,’ I said.

‘Then you don’t want a baby near bad as you put on.’ Widow Glendower’s words was cold and hard as winter turnips, and the least kindness had left her face.

‘Billy couldn’t never forgive me doing such a thing,’ I said.

‘Can you forgive him if you don’t have a baby? Can you reckon he will forgive himself?’

It was like she’d laid bare my heart’s secretest place, for I knew the truth of her words soon as I heard them, a truth I’d tried to hide from my own self.

I looked into the fire, looked at it the way Widow Glendower did, like as if I could find answers inside. I watched the flickering yellow flames a long time, thinking how when you looked at fire it was like looking at moving water, both ever changing and not changing all at the same time. Sweat started beading my brow like I was fevered. I felt like I did have a fever for my mind was fretful with a lot of both real and not real. Not real at least for right now.

‘You’d give me a charm to bring him to me?’ I asked.

Widow Glendower laughed.

‘A girl as fetching as you has got considerable enough of her own. All you got to do is let him see them charms, see all them. He’ll give you a baby.’

‘You promise?’ I said.

‘Oh, for certain I can promise that.’

I got up from my chair.

‘I don’t know that I can do such a thing.’

‘I think you can,’ Widow Glendower said, standing up and reaching the cup from my hand. ‘And you will.’

I reached into my dress pocket.

‘I brung you this,’ I said and held out a jar of blackberry jam. ‘I owe you and figured if you wouldn’t take no money you’d take a little something like jam.’

‘I’m not partial to blackberries,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘If you want to make us square even with each other, let me midwife that baby when the time comes.’

‘All right,’ I said, hardly giving a thought to what I was saying, for the most part of me still had no real believing it would happen.

‘It’ll be a joyous time and I’d not want to miss it,’ Widow Glendower said as she walked me to the door. ‘I’ll be a good granny-woman for you and that baby.’

I followed Wolf Creek back down to the river, the water swift and over its banks like even the smallest rivulet most always is in April. The river was high too, high enough the walk-log below Wadakoe Pool was near level with the water. Billy would be coming in from the fields soon for the sun was near noon high, but there’d be no plate of cornbread and beans waiting for him.