Mark said later I wasn’t out for long because my eyes were open when they got to me. The first thing I remember is Myra bending close and I was glad to see that she was sorry. She never said so but she didn’t have to, the guilt was all over her face. Mark helped me up and my head hurt so bad that I almost passed out again. It felt like a bowling ball on the end of my neck. They dusted me off and examined my scrapes and cuts before we started down. I’ll never forget how Myra looked back over her shoulder into the fog. That night I was so dizzy and sick that I stumbled out of bed and threw up twice. Afterward I lay in my room, head pounding and backside raw from Daddy’s belt, thinking about what Tina Cutshaw had said in fifth grade, that bad things would happen to me if I kept on loving Myra. I guess I knew even back then how things would turn out.
BYRDIE
The summer after we got married, Macon took me home to Blood-root Mountain and I been here ever since. Them was good years when I first came here to live. I’d set on the back steps looking off through the trees, breaking beans or shucking corn, or weaving me a rug for the floors. Sometimes a wind would come along smelling so sweet, like creek bank mud and pine needles and rainy weather. It’d lift my hair off of my shoulders and kiss my forehead the same way Macon did at night, and I’d know for sure I belonged here. But I did get homesick sometimes. I missed Mammy and Pap and our cabin in Piney Grove. They was less than five miles from the foot of the mountain and we still seen each other at church, but it was hard to be away from them during the week. Sunday afternoons Mammy would cook dinner for me and Macon and as much as I loved our house on the mountain, I’d wish sometimes to crawl in my feather bed up in the loft and sleep the day away. I was jealous of my time with Mammy and Pap and it was irksome when our Sunday dinners got interrupted. Word had got around about Pap’s gift for healing and many Sundays there’d be a knock on the kitchen door. He’d get up from dinner and somebody would be standing at the back steps with a baby on their hip. Pap would take the baby around the cabin, I guess for some privacy, and cure its thresh like he done mine. Then he’d come back in and set down at the table like nothing ever happened. Just being around Pap for a little while would set everything right with me and I’d head back up the mountain with Macon, happy as a lark again.
I helped Macon take care of his own pap, Paul Lamb, until he had another stroke and died. Then I took Becky and Jane to raise, until they growed up and married some boys that worked for the railroad. I learnt them how to sew, not just mend socks and put buttons back on, but how to make curtains and dresses. Where they’d been so long without a mammy, there was a lot them girls didn’t know. I learnt them how to make pie crust and how to season their beans and how to make their biscuits fluffy. I wasn’t much older than Becky and Jane and we had a big time together. In the summer worshing clothes we’d bust out in a water fight, or making bread we’d throw flour on one another until we was white-headed and the kitchen was a mess. It was worth cleaning it up for all the fun we had. If the chores was done sometimes we’d run off in the woods and play hide-and-go-seek. Macon would get mad enough to spit when he’d come in from the barn and see me acting like a youngun, but he got over anything pretty quick.
Before the road came through Macon farmed for a living. When the Depression hit, a lot of the men around here went off to work in the mills and coal mines, but Macon stayed with me. The banks started closing in 1929 and nobody on the mountain had two dimes to rub together. It was hard to buy sugar and salt and coffee, but we had a milk cow and laying hens and hogs to render fat for lard. We worked long hours in the hot sun until our fingers was blistered and our backs was sore. Once Roosevelt got in things started looking up for us, but it took years to climb out of the hole we was in.
Macon worked on the road when it came through. Him and the other men got out here and dug it with picks and shovels. I hated to see Macon give up farming, but I reckon he was happier working with his hands on cars for a living, after people in these parts started driving. Before he went to fixing motors down at the filling station in Piney Grove, he liked to whittle and build things out of scrap wood. He’d make birdhouses and whirligigs to put in the yard, and he could whittle any kind of animal you asked for. Me and him’d set out in the yard as the sun was going down and I’d love to watch him work a block of wood, his fingers moving that knife so swift. I was glad to be his wife.
I didn’t even mind taking care of poor old Paul before he died. Every morning I’d make Paul some mush and spoon it between his lips. Macon’d be down to the barn and Becky and Jane off to school. It was peaceful with just me and Paul in the house. I’d lead him to the front room window and feed him there so both of us could see the mountain and the sky. Then I’d get me a pan of soapy water and worsh him one piece at a time. Some days he’d look at me like he knowed what was going on, but others seemed like he was in a dream. I always believed he was dreaming about his life up here on the mountain, working the land and playing with his younguns. I figured he had it all stored up in his heart, didn’t matter where his body was at or what kind of shape he was in.
I got to where I loved old Paul, but he didn’t live long after me and Macon got married. Wasn’t long after we buried him down at Piney Grove Church that Becky and Jane was gone, too. I cried and cried when they ran off with them railroad boys. They was the only sisters I ever had. They used to come and visit sometimes before their husbands decided to move up north. They still write me letters but they never did come back. I don’t see how they stand it up there where it’s cold and the people’s so different.
Besides Becky and Jane, I had younguns of my own. Not long after me and Macon got married I was expecting, and none of us got too excited about it. It was just how things was. You got married and went to having younguns. The first one was Patricia. She was awful tiny and didn’t want to nurse them first few days, but I never doubted she’d take off. It never entered my head that Patricia might die, or that any of my younguns might not outlive me. Once Patricia took to nursing, she got fat as mud. Becky and Jane helped me with her, and then Jack and Sue when they came along, one right after the other. For a time I was nursing both of them at once, like twins. I used to set in a rocking chair in front of the kitchen door catching the breeze with one in each arm. I felt a contentment when I was nursing my babies that I reckon I’ll never know again.
Then all three of them, Patricia, Jack, and Sue, died of the diphtheria one winter. It was the year that Sue, my littlest, was turning two. I liked to lost my mind. I didn’t take them to the doctor right at first. It was before the road came through and we was snowed in that winter. Sometimes it’s like I dreamt them up, it’s been so long ago. I still can’t figure out how come me and Macon not to catch it. Them first days after the last one, Patricia, passed on, I waited for the fever to come. I wanted so bad to get sick and die. It was like a bridegroom had left me at the altar. I went out of my head and Macon didn’t know how to tend to me. Mammy and Pap came up the mountain to stay a few days but Mammy couldn’t do much with me, either. She tried putting on a cheery face and talking like I hadn’t lost my babies but I laid on the bed I’d birthed them in and wouldn’t get up. I didn’t want to eat and they had to pry my jaws open to force broth down my throat. I’d look past them as they fought me to Pap, standing there watching with bright light shining all around him. I don’t believe I imagined it, even in the state I was in. He never fussed or paced the floor or begged me to eat like Macon and Mammy did. He just stayed there in the room. Day or night I could open my eyes and he’d be setting at the foot of the bed, watching over me. I guess, looking back, I decided to come back to my life because Pap was still in it. I got better, but for a long time I went through my days living over and over that time when my younguns was getting sicker and nothing could be done. I got to where I thought it might not have really happened. I made up my mind they was still alive, just off somewhere playing. I don’t know when I figured out the bridegroom wasn’t coming for me and started putting one foot in front of the other again.