When I first arrived at his home he had not yet made good on his dream. There were chickens and cows and horses but no pigs. Then one afternoon he had a load of lumber and nails in, and the next morning he set Ulysses and Horace to building pens and sheds. One week later they all came, weeping and grunting like babies lost from heaven. The man who had driven them to us stayed for a week to show Linus Lancaster how it was done. They would rise early and go out to the pens and smoke and kick or coo at the pigs. The man ate at our table and winked at me, and one night after Linus Lancaster had retired with a poor tooth took Cleome by the waist and dandled her on his knee and would have done more than dandle, but he had drunk all we had and fell over onto the floor. The next day the man left the pigs he had brought to us behind and headed back down the road with his switch. On taking his leave he told Linus Lancaster that pigs never brought anything but peace to a man, and Linus Lancaster, who that very afternoon would have Ulysses yank that tooth from his mouth with a pair of tongs, said, “We’ll see.”
We did. You could see those pigs turning the greensward to filthy froth from the room where Linus Lancaster kept his bed. He liked to sing a little after he’d been in at me. He didn’t sing loud enough but what you could still hear those pigs snuffling and snoring in their pens. In the morning, maybe after he’d been at me again, he liked to go out and stand at the fences and sing and consider them.
They don’t all call me Scary here. That’s just the younger ones. The name I gave when I came up out of Kentucky and floated my sorry way north was just Sue. I gave them that name, which had been the name of that schoolteacher who had let me lead the lesson, because it was the first thing that came into my head when they asked me what I was called. I had not made any plan. I had not thought it through. My own old name had not come to me when I was asked, and after a minute the other one had. So it was Sue this and Sue that for my first years here, and then one of the little ones had come up on me when I was on my knees scrubbing and had my skirts lifted up over my ankles and saw the dark red ring just above my ankle bone. She saw it and said, “What is that?”
“That is what you call a scar,” I said.
“It looks all scarry,” she said.
“That’s just right, it is all scarry,” I said.
And I thought we had left it there. Only the next time I saw her she called me Scarry Sue, and some other of my employer Lucious Wilson’s children heard it and thought his sister had said Scary or liked it better that way, and then they were all calling me that.
“Tell us a story, Scary Sue,” they would say. “Scary Sue, fetch us some of that popcorn. Scary Sue, give us our bath.”
Lucious Wilson would have put a stop to it, but after the second or third time I heard him scolding I told him it didn’t matter and that I wasn’t hurt by it. He ought to let them call me what they wanted — they didn’t mean any harm. I told him I knew something about what harm was, and it didn’t have anything to do with his children and some name.
He didn’t argue. He knew about the scar on my ankle and he knew that whenever it started to settle I would give it a few fresh licks. He had walked in on me going after it one sunny Saturday not long after I had arrived. Had stood watching me let it bleed into my sock. Stain the bedsheets. Feed the floors. Drip through the tunnels. Head to the underparts of Kentucky. Talk to the worms.
“What are you doing, Sue?” he had asked.
“Traveling, Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I had answered.
“All right,” he had said.
Scary wasn’t wrong.
2
IT WAS OF A MORNING that Linus Lancaster was singing and conducting his considerations out by the pigpens in nothing but his work britches that my mother and my father came rolling over the stone bridge in the old cart they’d driven down the long road from Indiana. They rolled slow down the lane and took the look of the place and then a look at Linus Lancaster in his work britches standing barefoot beside the pens. I was in the kitchen with the girls and came out and watched Linus Lancaster pull his hands out of his pockets and approach the cart and call out a greeting and help my mother, his second cousin, down. You would have thought by the way he offered his bare arm to my mother and the way she took it that he was leading her to the big house he’d bragged about to her. My father came crippling on along behind them, and you didn’t have to squint to see what he thought of where the road and river crossing down from Indiana had taken him.
They had come for a look-see and a visit with their son-in-law and his wife, my mother said when Linus Lancaster had conducted them through the door and sequestered them at the table in the kitchen.
“You have apprehended me in my morning wear,” Linus Lancaster said.
He had sat down with them at the table in his bare feet and britches. He was nothing but muscle from one long end of him to the other. You could see like he was shouting it that my father would have wanted for nothing better than to pull off his wooden foot and take a turn at Linus Lancaster with it. I could see his mind had already hefted it over his head and brought it down. Instead he said, “We rode that cart five days to see your mansion and your fair fields, Son-in-law.”
“The mansion,” said Linus Lancaster, lighting up his pipe, “lacks nothing but the building. And as for my fields, they are fair. I will show them to you. They are the fairest in all of Charlotte County.”
My father said nothing to this but pulled out his own pipe and reached into the bag of tobacco Linus Lancaster held out to him. For her part, my mother saw Horace and Ulysses tending to the horses and Alcofibras walking by with a well bucket and Zinnia working at the stove and Linus Lancaster with all his muscles and said, “You have a fine number of help. I expect it is just the number you will need for your new home when it is built.”
They stayed with us for a week. My mother fussed alongside me at whatever I was doing and my father clucked his tongue, shook his head at the pigs, and took long cripple walks in the woods. When I was a girl I had liked to play at following behind my father, ghosting along in his tracks as he went his ways, and I took a turn at it on the second day of that visit. My father went his crippling path over the bridge and into the woods, and when he had got past the first hickories I stepped out after him. I’d been helping hang linens, but I just left the girls to their work and went walking. It wasn’t any trick to follow. My father’s wooden foot was narrow at the bottom, and when there was any wet to the ground it would sink on in and pull out clumps. I followed the clumps and divots and by and by, even though he’d had a start on me, I caught my father up. When I was little I had liked to holler out at him when I got close, and he had liked to pretend he didn’t know I’d been behind him, even though he had known it all along. When I saw my father on up a little ways, I thought, “And now I will holler and now he will turn and act like I’ve scared him, and now I will be back home in the goose pond again.”
I opened my mouth and got fixed to holler, “Hey, Papa,” even though I didn’t know if that was what I still ought to call him, and then I saw that my father was not alone. That he was standing in the shade of a hickory with Alcofibras. That he was talking to him and nodding his head, and Alcofibras was talking back to him and nodding his own. They talked, and that holler I had planned fell out of my mouth and died its death on the dirt floor, and I turned around as quiet as I could go, but when I looked over my shoulder they were both of them looking the whites of their eyes at me. I don’t know why, but when I saw that they had seen me I gave out a kind of squawk and took it in my head to run. I ran so hard and so fast that I lost my breath and got turned around and might have spent the night in the wood except that after a time here came Alcofibras. He didn’t say a word and didn’t stop, just looped a loop at the top of his walk and, when he saw that I was going to follow him and not run off again, went back the way he had come.