“I know you did,” my father said.
“If you were any other than my father-in-law I would whip you for it.”
“I expect you would try.”
“Old cripple like yourself.”
“Like I said it, you would try.”
“I saw you handing out candy too like this was your own house.”
“It was either that or feed it to your pigs. And how would you have felt about that?”
“Now, the both of you two,” my mother said.
“It’s all right,” said Linus Lancaster.
“Yes it is,” my father said.
There wasn’t anything much more to that visit from my mother and my father. On the morning they were getting settled out to leave, I told them I was sorry to watch them go and hoped my husband and I could repay the fine courtesy they had paid us one of these times. My father was over next to me when I said this, and he turned and said that he was not sorry. That all he could see in this place with its fine fields and mansions and pigs was dark, and that more dark was coming. I ought never to have left them, and he had his own fault in that, but now that I had I could never come home. There was things in this world and in the other that got started and couldn’t get stopped.
“Let me look at you now, Daughter,” he said.
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me. He leaned his head close to mine. I leaned my own closer to his.
“Follow us,” he said. He whispered it.
I leaned closer.
“Follow us away on out of here, Daughter. I will slow the wagon. Follow us like you did when you tracked me through the wood.”
My father had my own green eyes and I could see mine in his, and we leaned there together as my mother and Linus Lancaster stood off at some distance and looked on. “Hey, Papa,” I thought. I could hear myself holler it. But I heard it as if I was standing down at the bottom of a hole or somewhere under the waters, and hadn’t I just those days before stood there and watched my holler from the past die its death on the forest floor?
“I am married now, Father,” I said.
“And living in that fine house,” he said.
I did not answer this. We stood on there in the morning light a minute, then he turned.
“All right, I’ve had my look,” he said, then clumped up into the cart, and my husband, Linus Lancaster, handed up my mother and nodded at my father, and they clicked the horses and went off back over the stone bridge. I never saw one nor the other of them again.
There is a boy here works for Mr. Lucious Wilson who can sing. They say he came out singing and never quit. He has sung at the county fair and won himself an invitation to sing at the statehouse. I have heard him at the church, which is one of the places I do still go. They like to all go quiet now and again so he can have the show. It is a pretty kind of singing and a pleasant kind of voice. But when I lie down at night and think of that singing and the kind of singing Linus Lancaster could do at that place in Kentucky I know that the boy they stop the piano at church for here doesn’t have half the gift. Linus Lancaster could sing the skin off of one back and onto another. He told it once when a tinker was visiting and they were at the bottle that in Louisville he spent his share of time on the stage making speeches and singing, and that there were fine ladies of the neighborhood in attendance who had cried when he had done so. I did not cry when I listened to Linus Lancaster sing. But I listened and knew I was hearing something.
There were times after supper when Linus Lancaster would push back from the table and make a sound in his throat and give a curl to his lip, and we all knew it was time for a song. Horace and Ulysses could strum and thump when they were on their own time, and Cleome liked to clap and Zinnia to sing in a slow, private way, but it was all quiet when Linus Lancaster got the mood on him to sing after his supper. No one in that house made a sound when Linus Lancaster pushed his chair back and sucked in his air and blew that trumpet out of his throat. There were no uh-huhs or mmm-hmms, and if there was a drop of sweat tickling some lip or a fly biting at some neck the song was over before any of us moved.
Someone once told me when I was still living in my father’s house that I had a handsome voice and ought to shepherd it and not keep it to myself. After that I sang a little louder at our church and took a turn at a solo at my school. One night my first winter in Kentucky I thought to share that solo with my husband when that singing mood came upon him after his supper. He had not favored my story, but I thought he might favor my song. I sang and reckoned it was fair crooning, but Linus Lancaster’s fist came out so fast I thought an angel of the Lord had flown down off his shoulder to bestow its wroth. Even after Cleome, who was standing in attendance, had helped me back to my bench and my husband had wiped his hand and recommenced singing I thought this. I thought it then and now here it still sits. Funny how you can once think a thing then never see the tail of it.
My father liked to say God lived in the lightning and look out below. He told it that in the battles he fought when there was lead or arrows in the air the boys used to holler, “He’s a-comin’!” They get roused up when the fellow at church here sings “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.” But I keep quiet when he’s at it. There’s different kinds of glory. There’s all kinds. I have seen some.
3
MR. LUCIOUS WILSON, my employer, has pigs. He’s got his pens and fences and keeps them nice, and people come from around to look at them. If I understand it correctly, in recent times he’s had pigs that have earned prizes. For what I didn’t catch, but there were ribbons involved, and Lucious Wilson’s man responsible got a cash bonus and went out cavorting and kissed a girl and spent the night in a ditch. They found his horse five miles away eating at a patch of lawn grass. On account of some pigs.
Time and again when I was still working in Lucious Wilson’s big house I would hear it when they would stick one. Now that is a sound can make me cringe. I understand that there are things that live and things that get killed. That’s God’s plan, and we are all just meat for his platter, well and good. When they slaughtered beef and the beef knew it was coming there was a bellowing in the yard to beat the basket, but they could have killed beef from there until Sunday and I would have kept scrubbing and dusting and setting out the silver or whatever else my employer Lucious Wilson requested that I accomplish. But let that weather get cold and let them start in on one pig and then another and then a third and all of them doing their dying at once, and I would commence to pick at my ankle and decompose in my shoes.
Pigs are smart, and there is a sound that pigs being killed emit and I’ve got the evil rhyme to that particular complaint in my head. Now I live in this little house and do not go to the big house any longer and do not hear it when they put the chisel to their pigs, or smell it when they cut out the chitterlings and scrub the insides, or feel it when they push the pork pieces into the salt. There’s some will do backflips about a bacon breakfast, but I’ve still got teeth enough to get that product stuck between. I’ve still got a tongue to taste the pork blood and eyes to see the red come bubbling up out of the fresh meat when it’s pressed down with a finger or a fork. Lucious Wilson is as close as you can come to a saint on this earth, but I could do without his pigs and the place they give him in my running dream.
At Linus Lancaster’s home in Charlotte County, Kentucky, we ate pork morning, noon, and night. We ate it fresh, we ate it cured, we ate the cracklings, we ate the salty dribblings over our bread. We sat in the yard with pork in our hands, and we pulled it out of our pockets and ate it by the creek. What we didn’t eat we wore. Horace had a hand for turning leather. One Christmas he made me the prettiest pair of boots. You could walk all day in the puddles in those boots and not get wet. Linus Lancaster got a sheath for his knife and Cleome a pair of shoes. Horace had been in a squabble with Zinnia about something or the other, and all she got was a hat chucked out of the scraps. She wouldn’t wear it until Linus Lancaster made her.