It was a kind of spring morning with a kind of warm sun and we had all spilled ourselves out of the church, and I was waiting for them to finish their quiet talking so we could get home and look to dinner when Mr. Lucious Wilson, my employer and the owner of this little house and this barley field and all that surrounds it and the whole wide world for all I care, called over to me, “Come on out of that shadow and into this sunshine.”
So I thought, yes, shadow is the word and I have seen it and I have heard it before and thought it before but now I know it. It has been said.
Shadow.
Which is where I’ve been and where I am and where I’m wending my sorry way. So if I say I can look now at my earliest days in that place in Kentucky at the home of my husband Linus Lancaster and see the light of a pretty, unhurt place shining on us all, you can know and I can say that this is just tricks from a mind that wants what was to be otherwise but can’t change it.
If I say that in my early days there was a meadow where I would walk with the girls, Cleome and Zinnia, to look out for daisies, and where we would sit together of a morning and make chains that could have stretched all the way to Louisville, you would be right to look me square in my shadowy eye and say you don’t believe me. If I tell you that in those days I would go to look at the colts when they were dripping fresh, with Cleome and Zinnia to my sides or me to theirs, and that we would pick big tomatoes for the table out of little Alcofibras’s gardens and play in the yard at weighing them on the market scales or go together to the woods to look for mushrooms or lie as flat as you like on our backs by the creek or hold hands and skip like faeries and flap our arms together like blue jays or hold our faces up to the falling snow like three fingers of the same fork, you will say, and I will nod, that it cannot have been.
There is a shadow covers it all now.
There was already shadow deep enough to drown in back then.
Drown me and those girls. Drown little Alcofibras. Drown those daisies. That meadow. Those tomatoes. That sun.
Cleome and Zinnia helped me get settled at the home of Linus Lancaster, and they helped me when he commenced to have me into his bedroom.
They helped me, but I never helped them.
That is not true. That is not the truth’s only portion, not the whole of it. I helped them in those years that came by helping them in other ways. I helped them when they had the fever headache or when they had the ague or when they had the festery eye. I helped them when the tobacco grew so thick they cried to contemplate the day that had to be spent in it, or when there were too many hides to tan, or too much corn to put up, or a biting goat that needed chasing, or a pig that was too mean.
Zinnia hated icicles, was afraid they would fall on her hat and pierce through her head, so when they got too big and it was her had been set to knocking them off the eaves, and Cleome and the others were at some other work, it was me went around whacking at them with the broom. I like the sound of an icicle hitting snow. The kind of long cave it will make. How it will keep a week without melting when it lies inside that softer cold.
I helped them with their first girl sicknesses, told them, as my mother had told me, what it was they had to do. They took my hand and thanked me for that. Each one of them in her turn. I think Zinnia’s eye might have sprung a tear. Little bitty thing like a ball of dew. I helped them with that and I helped them sweep and I helped them pluck and I helped them darn and I helped them sew.
I helped them in those ways and in others, and once one rosy summer day when Linus Lancaster was looking for her with a switch in his hand, I didn’t tell him I’d seen Cleome drop the bucket into the well and dangle herself down its rope.
“What did you do?” I said, after Linus Lancaster had got tired of yelling and chasing and dropped his switch and gone off to swear and smoke in the woods. Cleome was deep down in the well, her feet almost tickling the water.
“I spilled coffee on his shoe, then I made him trip when I was cleaning it up,” she said.
“Sounds like maybe you deserved some switching,” I said. I laughed when I said this and added on for merry measure that I thought a switch or two seemed a small thing to make her creep all the way down a well. She did not laugh though, just looked up at me. There was a cold coming up with her eyeballs out of the dark. Cold made me think of one of those icicle caves. After a while, so you can see how truth has its portions, meager may they be, I steadied the rope and helped her climb back up.
I told it earlier that my teacher in Indiana at the little brick school I used to go to before I joined Linus Lancaster in his paradise had let me lead the lesson. She had let me lead the lesson and had invited my parents in to hear it, and my father came and sat in the back and heard the teacher tell the class that at least she had one pupil that had a head and not a stuffed feed sack to do her thinking with. I had written down a story about a princess who came by luck and cunning and other such foolery to be queen of the clouds, and the teacher had me read that after I had led them all through letters and numbers and the naming of the countries of the world. I had written down that story while the others of them had frolicked to no clear purpose, the teacher said. I had sat on my bench and composed that story, and now we had heard it and were the better, every last one.
When we got back home my mother asked my father, “How was the show?”
“That’s about what it was,” my father said. He put his hand a minute on my arm when he said this. Then he let it go.
Often was the time in those early days in Kentucky that I thought about that story I had written and about that day in the school. I told Cleome and Zinnia about it and they made me tell it again and again for the several days after.
“I’d like to live up on one of those clouds,” Cleome said.
“And drink up that lemonade,” said Zinnia.
“We could all live up there together,” I said.
They had me tell it to Alcofibras, but he just shook his head and said clouds were cold places to live.
I also told my husband, Linus Lancaster, who appreciated the delicacies of the mind even as he kept his hand always near a switch, as he was at his supper. He heard it and looked at me twice or thrice, then got up, walked to my trunk, fished the four or five books I had brought up out of it, and heaved them over into the stove.
“No more clouds now, Ginny,” he said. Then he called for his bath, and I knew it was time for me to go and wait for him in the bedroom. When he came into the bedroom, fresh from his bath, my husband made himself ready before me. He liked to stand, at the ready, in his nothings. And he did this for a time that night. Then he drew the covers back and lay down.
“We have the Bible for stories, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said to me after. “Look to those good words and to those good words alone now. There wasn’t any book but the good one for my dearly departed, and there won’t be any other for you.”
But there was no book good or otherwise in that cabin with its long corridor. I looked all the next day for it. The girls said they had never seen any good book in Linus Lancaster’s house and wouldn’t speak a peep to whether or not his dearly departed had had one. When I inquired to him about it he said it was here somewhere, he’d had it out recently, and that if I was too rearward to find it that was none of his affair. Then he had me back into his bed.
When Linus Lancaster was in trade in Louisville and still sharing his table with his dearly departed, he made the money he did make in the barter of livestock, and that was when he started dreaming about his place in paradise that would take care of him like the ancient lands took care of the Israelites. He told me this the first time in his bed with his arms on my shoulders and his face over mine. He also told me that it was after he had started to conjuring this way that he had fallen asleep one night and seen a countryside covered in pigs. The land, he told me, was green and the pigs roamed the land and there in the middle of it stood the shining house he would tell his second cousin, my mother, about as my father listened.