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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781461623342 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bridgeworks |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 262 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
At age forty-nine, Willa Giberson suddenly found herself with her daughter Chastity's newborn to raise. From an instinct all but forgotten, she put the squalling infant to one thin breast. Like any newborn animal, it knew to suck. Willa's breasts began to fill with a colorless fluid, an occurrence known as the "wet-nurse phenomenon," and by the end of the first week the fluid had turned chalky white. Just as she had thought she was slowing down, her monthlies coming only now and then, she found herself thrust back into mothering.
"It appears we're in the soup," Worthy said, as he watched his wife trying to quiet the crying baby. "I figured at our age we was through diapering babies."
"It must of been God's Will, it sure wasn't mine," Willa said, still surprised to find a red, wrinkled infant lying in her lap. "But he's here, and I'm already taken with him."
"I can tell that by just looking at the two of you together." Worthy's usual noncommittal expression began to take on some of its old youthful pride. He pondered a moment. "Who's to say? Maybe having a young one underfoot will keep us on our toes. Leastwise we won't have time to set and rock. I reckon you'll get first turn at the boy, he needs to start out with a mother, and somewhere down the road I'll take over. I'm game if you are."
Willa sighed. "I never was good at saying no."
The baby began to cry louder. Seems he's always hungry, Willa thought as she put him to her breast again. She leaned back in the rocking chair and closed her eyes, allowing randommemories of Chastity to rush over her as they so often did these days. Was it only two short years ago that Chastity had come to her with those first awful fears? She easily recalled the incident—still so vivid in her mind.
Willa had been in the cellar, waist high in dirty clothes, when Chastity approached her. Tears ran down the girl's face as she stood in front of her mother, and between sobs began telling what had happened overnight.
"Ma, there's something bad wrong with me. My sheet—it's covered with bloody spots and I've got this funny hurting in my stomach. What do you think's the matter, Ma? Do I have to see Doc Potter?" She looked at Willa expectantly, fearing the worst.
Willa had believed there was plenty of time before her twelve-year-old daughter would come sick. Girls grow up faster nowadays, she thought sadly, searching for words to explain Chastity's malady.
"It's not so bad as it first seems," Willa said, as she tried to calm her anxious daughter. "It's just another of God's punishments for women—because of Eve and her sinful ways with Adam. It happens to every girl."
"But what does it mean?" Chastity sobbed.
"It means your body's ready to produce babies, but the rest of you is barely past playing with dolls."
"Will it come again, the bleeding?" Chastity asked, her sobs beginning to lessen.
"Once a moon," Willa had said as she piled a basket high with wet clothes ready for the line. "And there are some rules that go with it. Make sure not to take a bath during your time, and especially don't run or jump or wash your head." She handed the girl a gray rag from the rag bag. "Pin this to your underwear and be sure to rinch it out every night. Otherwise you'll be drawing boys."
"But Ma, there's something else. I get these strange feelings that come every night when I'm trying to go to sleep. Even counting sheep won't make them go away." She was on the verge of tears again.
Willa knew what was going on with her daughter. When she was a girl herself it had taken all her efforts to suppress those nightly urgings. "What you're feeling is normal for a girl of twelve," she said, "but you need to curtail such yearnings till your wedding night. Men don't like an easy quality in a wife." Willa had been surprised to hear her own mother's words coming out of her mouth.
Willa was not a woman given to looking deep into life. Raised a Hard Shell Baptist, she learned never to question when good or bad came about, God's Great Plan being of necessity hidden from mortals, women in particular. When she first learned her daughter, only fourteen years old, was with child, she accepted it as God's Work, though she could not understand His motive. More than once, when Chastity was carrying the baby but not yet showing, Willa had asked her to name the father, but the girl only shrugged her shoulders and went mute.
Willa had dreaded telling Worthy, but on hearing of their daughter's predicament he merely said, "Now don't that cap all!"—the only words passed between them on the subject. (When it was time to name the baby, those words returned to Willa. "Cap Giberson, he'll be called, Cappy for short." She repeated the name until it felt natural to her tongue.)
Neither Willa nor Worthy had known how desperately Chastity tried to discourage the unwanted thing growing inside her: spreading her legs and poking with Willa's number nine knitting needle; swallowing salts laced with a pinch of arsenic; pushing and prodding at her round little belly hoping to expel the squirmy growth. But Cappy would not be dissuaded. In spite of repeated affronts from sharp objects and bitter poisons, after eight long months inside Chastity's hostile body, he weighed eight pounds. On the morning of April 1, 1925, one well-placed kick sent Chastity's water spilling across the kitchen floor.
Willa called for Aunt Pearl, a self-taught midwife who lived in a lean-to near Coal Hollow. By the time the old woman arrived at the Giberson house with her bag of crude instruments and homemade potions, Chastity was screaming and thrashing in the bloody bed. Finally, after ten hours of birthing misery, one of Cappy's feet popped out. Aunt Pearl reached in with both grimy hands and pulled.
Chastity had taken one look at the wriggling baby and said to Willa, "You can have it."
Following the birth, Chastity lay in oblivion, her fever rising. On the third day Worthy sent for Doc Potter, but by then the child-bed fever had a firm hold. When her son was only three days old, Chastity died.
At the funeral, Brother Beams kept the mourners two hours. He expounded on God's Mercy and God's Love, and he even brought in the story of the Three Wise Men and the Prodigal Son. Chastity having been called home early was God's Will, he said, and therefore not to be argued with. She was no doubt looking down from Heaven at that very moment, wishing the entire family would soon join her.
Cappy, asleep in Willa's arms, loudly filled his diaper.
That night, as the mourning family was preparing for bed, a car drove up the lane and parked in front of the house. The driver impatiently honked the horn.
Worthy raised the window and yelled. "Who is it and what do you want at this ungodly hour?"
"Drayton R. Hunt. There's a matter that needs tending to."
"Can't it wait till daylight?"
"It sure as hell can't."
Generally, Worthy avoided Drayton Hunt, a bully by reputation and a bootlegger. As a boy, long before prohibition, Drayton had been hired by his uncle to deliver bootleg liquor in townships that temperance advocates had already turned "dry", and after his uncle's death, he took over the lucrative business. By 1925, scotch was selling for $45 a case, beer for $30.
By the time Worthy was dressed and out the front door, Drayton was standing next to his elegant 1924 Moon; its idling engine emitted a low growl, its headlamps glowed like an alley cat's eyes. Drayton rested a hand on the open door, a lighted cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his eyes defiant. Worthy noted Drayton's acne-scarred face, his tall, skinny frame.
"This better be good," Worthy said, as he approached Drayton. "I ain't in the best of moods after the day I've been through."
"Your recent grief is mainly why I'm here," Drayton said, snuffing out his cigarette and tossing it away. "It just may be I can ease your burden somewhat. You not being so young as you once was, or your good wife either, I've come to take that baby off your hands."
"Why in God's name would you offer such a thing? You ain't knowed for your kind works."
"Because that baby might just have some of my red blood running through his veins."
"What are you hinting at?" A chill went down Worthy's back.
"I ain't hinting at nothing, I'm stating a fact. I was well acquainted with that girl of yours, and now I've come to claim what's mine."
Worthy moved closer to Drayton and shouted directly in his face. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch, before I claim your hide! Am I getting through to you?"
Drayton spat close to Worthy's bare feet and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Sounds to me like you don't believe a word I said."
"You're damned right I don't, you bastard!"
"It appears I ain't the only bastard you're dealing with these days!"
Worthy's bowels turned to water as he pictured Drayton with his young daughter. Surely she wouldn't have willingly bedded with this piece of shit, he thought, but there's no way of knowing the truth.
"Believe what you want, it don't matter to me," Drayton said, "but that high and mighty daughter of yours was as hot for my pecker as a common whore. Dwell on that every time you look at her bastard baby!"
Worthy could have killed Drayton Hunt without a second thought, but he would not dishonor his daughter by dropping to Drayton's level. All he wanted was to end this talk and fall into bed. He took a step back. "You've said what you come to say, now get off my land."
"That suits me, but I'll be back." Drayton got into his motor car and roared out the lane, covering Worthy with his dust.
Worthy walked toward the well, sick with grief. After sitting through his daughter's funeral, he had thought the day couldn't get any worse. He dipped cold water from the bucket and drank slowly, feeling the cold go all the way down. He poured what was left in the dipper on top of his head.
Although Worthy did not want to believe Drayton's disturbing story, the implications were enough to ruin many nights of sleep. He would not add to Willa's sorrow by telling her the purpose of Hunt's visit. Worthy walked slowly back to the house, tired as if he had spent the day walking behind a plow.
In the days after the funeral, Worthy and Willa tried to make sense of their daughter's death. They each had regrets, even feelings of guilt, but neither blamed the other. After supper they sat together near the heating stove reminiscing about Chastity. Cappy, lying in his basket at Willa's feet, made small noises.
"What on earth did we do to earn such harsh judgment from God?" Willa asked, her face a constant frown these days. "I hardly ever raised my voice at her."
"Hell, Willa, we didn't watch her careful enough and some young buck coaxed her to lay with him. If that God of yours was paying attention, He would of stopped the act before it begun!"
"She sure was smart when it came to books," Willa said, not addressing Worthy's bitter remarks. "Remember how she wanted to be a schoolteacher?"
"I put the quietus to that notion. I blame that pinchy-faced old maid teacher for planting such lofty ideas in her head."
"She was always a Daddy's girl," Willa said, her memories of Chastity jumping from one incident to another. "Remember, Worthy, how you couldn't sit down without her climbing on your lap begging for a story?"
Worthy did remember. As a little girl Chastity had trailed after him while he fed the stock and did the milking. And on a hot summer evening when he went to the outhouse to sit, she would follow as far as the hollyhocks and wait patiently for him to finish so he could tell again her favorite story.
But he also remembered how overnight their relationship changed. When she had taken on the scent of a woman at only age twelve, he became embarrassed by any show of affection from her. He assumed a gruffness that neither father nor daughter understood, causing a growing distance between them.
The September that Chastity was to enter eighth grade, Worthy widened the gap further. He brought up the matter with Willa, certain she would agree with him as she did with all of his ideas.
"I've been thinking about the girl," he said. "She's already got as much schooling as you or me, and if she stays here to home, you could make good use of the help around the house and garden."
Willa remembered when her own mother had made the same decision, and how devastated she had been at being forced to leave school and her friends behind. She knew Chastity would feel the same. In that brief instant, Willa's hopes for her daughter went up in Worthy's smoke. "Are you thinking she should quit going?"
"That's what I'm thinking."
"She's awful smart, Worthy. She never brings home a grade under 95. Seems a pity somehow."
"I ain't arguing but what she's smart, but that don't change my thinking. You know as well as I do that females belong in the home, raising babies and cooking meals. The world would be in a sorry state of affairs if females forgot their place."
"I'll call her and see what she has to say about it," Willa said.
When Chastity heard her name being called, she reluctantly put aside her book and went downstairs. "Now what?" she asked through the screen door.
"Your ma and me has been thinking about your schooling," Worthy said, getting right to the matter, "and how you've had enough. More than likely you'll be a wife and ma someday, like your own ma, and it's time you stayed home and learned how to do womanly work."
"But Pa, I was counting on being a schoolteacher!" she cried. "Like Miss Self! She says I'm smart enough to go through high school, even college. I don't want to be a wife and ma!"
"You're too comely to wind up an old-maid schoolteacher—" But before he could finish his thought, she had stormed back up the stairs.
"I sure as hell wasn't expecting that!" Worthy said to Willa.
"I was, but you had to hear it for yourself." It won't seem right this September not buying her school shoes and books, Willa thought. Growing up a female wasn't easy.
When chastity didn't answer roll call the first day of school, Miss Self dropped in on the Gibersons. Thinking Chastity might be ill, she had brought along some books to occupy the girl's time. She slowed the car to make the sharp turn into the Giberson lane, carefully picking her way between the ducks and guinea hens, and coasted to a stop directly in front of the two-story, red tile farmhouse.
Worthy was sitting on the front stoop sharpening his knife, preparing to rid the late-summer lambs of their tails. He was not happy to see Miss Self. Not only had she disobeyed the laws of nature by not having a man to look after her, damned if she didn't drive a Model T Ford!
"Good afternoon, Mr. Giberson," she said. She tried to smile.
"Afternoon." Worthy did not look up from his work, his attention on drawing a fine edge to his blade.
"I noticed Chastity wasn't in school this morning. Is she sick?"
"No, she ain't sick."
"Then why was she absent?"
"Her ma and me figured she's had enough schooling. For a female," he added.
"But Mr. Giberson, she's my best pupil, especially in English. The stories she hands in show so much imagination and her grammar is flawless. I'm certain she would make a fine English teacher." She looked expectantly at Worthy.
"Meaning no disrespect, but women belong in the home, and if I have any say-so, that's where she'll stay."
"But a student like your daughter seldom comes along. She can answer a question before I finish asking—"
"I've spoke my piece." Worthy had run out of arguments, and was ready to end the conversation.
"Mr. Giberson, you aren't the first ignorant man I've had to confront, and you probably won't be the last," Miss Self said, her voice suddenly sharp. "Denying Chastity the opportunity to fulfill her God-given gift of intelligence is nothing short of criminal!"
Even now, two years later, Worthy remembered the insult with anger. He had not been accustomed to hearing a woman raise her voice at him, and he had no intention that day of allowing Miss Self to get the better of him.
He stirred the dwindling fire and sat back in his easy chair, recalling the rest of the confrontation.
"Now you're getting to the crux of the matter," he had said to Miss Self, "placing the blame square where it belongs, direct on God's shoulders. That 'gift' as you call it should of been give to my thick-headed boy where it could of been put to good use. A man needs all the brains he can get if he aims to prosper in this world and take care of his womenfolk. Getting back to God, I ain't strong for the Bible, but I do know this much—God made females to be helpmates to men. Now if them females is off teaching school or the like, men come up suffering. And we both know that ain't what God had in mind." He stood. "My lambs is waiting."
"Here are some books I brought for Chastity," Miss Self said. "They're hers to keep." Her hands shook with anger as she put them on the porch steps.
"Self-righteous old maid," Worthy muttered, as he watched Miss Self crank the Model T and drive away.
Worthy did not waver from his decision. Chastity remained home where she learned to bake crusty bread and sew a fine hem and push the carpet sweeper and stretch lace curtains. But in the privacy of her room, she read the books Miss Self had brought until they fell apart.
Over the years, Worthy had not allowed himself to consider how her life might have turned out had he not interfered.
Cappy stirred in his basket. Willa picked him up and put him over her shoulder; she hummed softly.
"Time we was going to bed," Worthy said, standing up and stretching. "The fire's about out—I don't want Cappy getting the croup." He banked the fire for the night, and closed the damper.
"I'll be along shortly," Willa said. She rocked for another five minutes, and then slowly climbed the stairs to bed.
At five o'clock the next morning, the alarm rang, but Willa burrowed deeper under the covers. Just a few minutes more, she thought, recalling the recent sad days, anticipating what lay ahead. Now the only female in a family of males, the care of the house and Cappy would be totally hers, at least while he was too young to help around the farm.
Feeling her forty-nine years, Willa crawled out of bed, tired from tending the colicky baby through the night. As babies will, at first light Cappy had fallen asleep. She bent over the crib railing and kissed his head; it smelled of baby powder and sleep.
Her black mourning dress was still lying across the back of the chair. Years before she had made the dress for the inevitable day she would become a widow, never dreaming she would wear it to her daughter's funeral. She shook out the wrinkles and hung it out of sight in the back of the closet.
Worthy and Tick, their eleven-year-old son, already up and halfway through chores, would be coming in soon expecting breakfast. But Willa was in no hurry to start cooking. She fluffed the duck-feather pillows and pulled up the faded "double wedding ring" quilt. For a moment she thought she heard Chastity's step in the hallway coming to help. But those sharing times were gone, she thought sadly—not part of God's scheme or He would not have taken her daughter from her after only fourteen short years. Of all the troubles Willa had experienced, losing Chastity was the most painful and the most puzzling. I may need some help getting through this tribulation, Willa said to God.
Keeping her back to the mirror, she took off her long flannel nightgown. She believed a woman's naked body was not meant to be looked at, even by her own eyes. In twenty-five years of marriage, Worthy had not once seen her naked.
Unlike most farm women, who bathed only on Saturday in preparation for the Saturday night picture show and Sunday morning worship, Willa performed her toilet daily. She poured cold water into a pan and quickly washed her body. After drying herself, she dusted talcum under her arms, and rubbed some between her legs for good measure. She put on a dress made from flowered feed sacks, and a clean apron of like material, black shoes that laced, and heavy cotton stockings. The stockings were too hot for spring wear, but they helped hide the bulging veins in her thick legs.
Willa stood back and studied her reflection in the mirror. A plump, plain woman with deep frown lines, and pale blue eyes that held no hint of humor, stared back at her. Even as a baby she hadn't been pretty, her mother had told her often enough. But pretty isn't everything, Willa thought in her own defense. (Had she told her own daughter that she was pretty? She couldn't remember.)
Willa smoothed her sparse gray hair into a tight bun and pinned in a matching net, giving her hair the look of dusty cobwebs. Once her hair had been like Chastity's, the color of golden corn shucks, and had been instrumental in drawing Worthy's first look. She recalled the play party where they had met and how they danced every reel, her long hair bouncing with each step. Worthy was still the best dancer in Greene County, though lately there had been neither time nor spirit for dancing.
Cappy was awake again and fussing. Willa changed his diaper and wrapped him in a light blanket against the early morning coolness. Balancing him on one shoulder, she carried him gingerly down the steep steps. "Twelve," she said out loud as she reached the bottom step. "Now what do you suppose caused that to come out of my mouth?"
Willa put Cappy in his basket and started breakfast. She stood at the cookstove frying fresh side meat and eggs, still puzzling over the number she had spoken for no apparent reason. She set the hot food on the table just as Worthy and Tick came in from the barn.
"One," Willa said, as they sat down to eat.
"One what?" Worthy asked. "Pass the side meat, Tick."
She thought for a minute. "One week since the funeral, I suppose."
After breakfast was over and the last dish washed and put away, Willa glanced at the kitchen curtains. The background was white, sprinkled with tiny pink flowers, but smoke from the cookstove had turned the white gray. These are due for the wash, she thought. "Fifty-six." Her hand flew to her mouth. "Land, what's happening to me?"
She looked again at the curtains and one by one counted the flowers. Fifty-six. Willa was worried; she was not inclined to talking to herself, as many lonely farm wives did. And how could she have known there were fifty-six flowers before she counted them? She sat at the kitchen table and read through the Farmer's Almanac to see if mention was made of the ailment. Two paragraphs were devoted to dropsy (acute and regular), and female complaints took several pages on both sides, but she found nothing that mentioned calling out numbers. I must be the only one with this problem, she thought, wondering why God had singled her out once again.
Finally she settled on a reason based on her Baptist background. God wants everything in His Kingdom to be counted, she thought, and He wants me to help with the counting. In exchange, He won't call me home before my time like He did Chastity. With Baptists all over the world talking to God, I'd best count out loud so He'll be sure to hear me.
Though not aware of it, Willa had been counting to herself for years. She could have recited the number of buds on the rose trellis the previous summer, or how many stitches were in her "double wedding ring" quilt, or the number of steps the mule took from home to town. The ritual had begun with her first pregnancy; counting the days until she would be delivered, counting the days until Worthy would again intrude himself into her body.
In her depression over losing Chastity, Willa's need to count became vocal. Now, not only did she know she was counting, so did Worthy and Tick.
"God, doesn't expect stars and blades of grass to be counted," she explained to Cappy, as she oiled him from head to toe with fresh-rendered lard. "And dove droppings, they can't be counted. Eye blinks can be counted. But not gnats." At nighttime, her day's work done, she would tiptoe through the house counting heads on pillows: Tick made one, Worthy two, Cappy's towhead made three, and her own head would make four when she could find time to lay it down. Sometimes she counted Chastity's empty pillow, saying "five" in a low voice to keep from waking Worthy.
At harvest time that year and with extra farmhands to cook for, Willa turned the care of the baby over to Tick. Every morning she pumped her breasts dry and filled two bottles with the warm, rich milk. She showed Tick how to prop the bottle so Cappy wouldn't suck air and get colic, and how to change his diaper without sticking the wriggling baby's bottom with a pin. Cappy soon learned that one loud cry would bring Tick running to his side.
Tick was happy with his new duties; they beat working in the fields hearing his pa yell orders at him like he was a goat. He didn't even mind changing the urine-smelling, soggy diapers. When he would accidentally touch Cappy's tiny penis, it would grow as straight and stiff as a tenpenny nail.
To feed the hungry farmhands coming in at noontime, Willa baked four pies—two fresh peach, two wild blackberry. She scrubbed seventy-two new red potatoes for boiling, fried five young roosters and opened two jars of last year's Country Gentleman sweet corn; four hundred and thirteen tiny white kernels were packed inside each blue jar.
One hundred eighty-three days since the funeral.
Even after Cappy outgrew diapers, Tick, who had quit school after the fourth grade, continued caring for the boy. When Cappy began to walk, the two became inseparable, in spite of eleven years' difference. The first thing every morning, Cappy would set out looking for Tick, and once he found him, he would not leave his side until bedtime.
As soon as he could put words together, Cappy began asking questions. Worthy and Willa were too busy to attend to his growing curiosity, but Tick always had time. Though Worthy found his older son backward, Cappy believed that his big brother knew the answer to everything. In return, Tick reveled in the admiring attention from the boy, the only person in the house to give him credit. Teacher and pupil. A satisfying arrangement. Neither cared that Tick's answers usually missed the mark.
When Cappy was almost six, he and Tick were walking through the south pasture, and came upon the old ram mating with a ewe. Although Tick had witnessed such scenes many times, it was Cappy's first.
"Tick, look at that! What's Old Rammy doing?"
"He's fornicating."
"What's that?"
"It's when he pokes his peter inside her. That's what peters are for, to poke into something."
"I use mine for peeing out of," Cappy said.
"Someday you'll find something you want to poke it into."
"You're the smartest brother in the whole world," Cappy said, as they walked toward the woods, hand in hand.