A Parchment of Leaves Read online

  Esme come and got Birdie by the hand. “Go lay down with Mamaw,” she said.

  “I’ll help you get her situated,” I said, starting to get up.

  “Naw, Aidia can. She has to bring Matracia in there to me.” I wondered if this was her way of getting Aidia away from Dalton. She waved good night to everybody and led Birdie through the house.

  The fiddler started right in on a fast tune, so that people jumped up to dance again. But I had to get away from the crowd for a little while. I wanted to breathe the night air and collect myself.

  I let my fingers trail out of Saul’s hand. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said.

  I went out the back door, looking behind me every now and then as if I was doing something I shouldn’t. I could hear the hens clucking and stirring about inside their house in the corner of the yard. I walked away until the music was just a thudding sound far behind me.

  A group of men stood in the front yard as I come around the side. They were out there drinking, as they knowed Esme wouldn’t allow anything in her house. There was a woman out there with them, too, her laughter loud and high on the winter night. I eased by them in the darkness. One of the men said something in a snickering voice, and the woman slapped her thigh when she laughed.

  I went down the road past my own house and into the backyard. I stood for a moment in the garden. The swelling moon lit the ground in silver and shadows. There was nothing here but fodder shocks and some turnips that had gone to rot. Come spring, this patch of earth would be bushy and tall and I would be able to lie in my bed and hear the plants rubbing against one another in a midnight breeze. The scent of the soil was fragrant on the cold air. I hoped that by the time spring came, I would be able to keep my marriage, too. That I would be able to give it the same nurturing that I found easy to give to the corn and the tomatoes. Raising a garden and keeping a marriage in shape are not that different, I realized.

  I walked on to the mountainside and up onto the path. I was dying for spring to come and put these hills back to their right shape. I could see the outlines of the mountains, blacker than the black sky. They seemed small and squat without leaves. Come April, these trees would be full of bud, fat with life. But for now there were only bare branches, as thin and knotty as finger bones. I breathed in winter air and imagined it was spring. I conjured up the smell of dogwoods and redbuds, the warmth of an April rain upon my face. It had been so long since I had felt the sun on the back of my neck, but I nearly wished it into being. I felt that once spring came, I might be saved. All my grief and guilt would be taken from me and soaked up by the leaves.

  Spring would come. It was not too far away. With each snow that fell over the next three months, I would be closer to real sunlight, to flowers poking their heads up between the cracks of the cliffs. I would be free. I thought of that song Serena sometimes sang: ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’Tis the gift to be free.

  And then I knowed that I was fooling myself. The rains of spring would not wash away what had already been done. This would live with me the rest of my days, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Despite everything, at least I am still free, I thought. Many people were not. If Saul or Esme knowed that Aaron laid up on that mountain, I might be throwed in jail, or hung. I didn’t know what they would do. Still, it didn’t matter; guilt is the worst, smallest kind of jail. I was trapped inside myself from now on—as if my soul could not flutter past my rib cage.

  Twenty-four

  Winter was as silent and gray as sleep. Snow stayed on the ground for weeks at a time. The creek froze and did not move for a whole month. All the world was still, except the sky, which groaned and rolled overhead. The snow fell in every way possible: sometimes it was thin and fast, hitting the earth like hard little pebbles; other times it come in flakes as big as quarters that caked up on the windowsills and fell so wet that it stood inches tall on tree limbs.

  That winter it was like me and Saul were settling into each other all over again. It was much like the first year of our marriage, getting reacquainted with each other. Every night he put his hands on me. He spent a long time kissing me, running his fingers across my face as if making sure it was really me there beneath him. At first I had laid there silent, tears coming from the corners of my eyes. It took me a long time to let him go any further. Sometimes I couldn’t even stand for him to touch me, but I had no way of telling him why. We didn’t argue over this. Instead he would turn away wordlessly, knowing that silence was the thing I dreaded most. But this time he was wrong, for I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to tell him why. I couldn’t.

  Eventually, though, I began to trust him. I found comfort in his kisses, in the feel of his hands running over my body. Instead of being afraid, I started to feel safe when he held me that way. I learned his body again and looked forward to his warmth, surrounding me from all directions.

  Saul talked all of the time after he got back. Sometimes when he passed me he would grab me round the waist and twirl me around and kiss me. I often wondered if my true husband had returned from Laurel County. Could months of loneliness change a man? We were happy in a way that I had never knowed before. My mama and daddy had gotten along good for the most part, but they had never really seemed like this. No married people I knowed were really happy except for me and Saul. And I refused to feel guilty for this happiness. When I was reminded of that night on the mountain, pulling rocks over Aaron’s body, I pushed it from my mind as easily as I might have shook dandelion fluff from my hair, thinking only of making everything good and right for Saul and Birdie. But I was fooling myself. No matter how many times I would shed myself of those thoughts, they would creep right back in. I was never without them for very long.

  When Saul come home from the mill in the evenings, he sometimes helped me quilt. There was nothing for him to do outside. Darkness descended early and had usually already overtaken the holler by the time he got home. We hardly ever left the house except to go to Esme’s for supper, or up to Aidia’s for a candy-making. She made big kettles full of peanut butter or chocolate fudge, and all of us ate until we could take no more. As winter got deeper and deeper, our world growed more and more small. Often I went a whole two weeks without going to the town, as I didn’t want to risk taking Birdie out into the fierce weather. When I did go down to the post office, there was always a letter from my mother, who spoke of North Carolina as if it was the promised land. “Jubal says he is going to make his way back up to Kentucky before long. When he was overseas, he said if he ever got back home, he’d go see his big sister,” Mama wrote, but I knowed that Jubal wouldn’t be coming for a long while. It was too far, and he hadn’t been home from the war long. “Your daddy is walking good on his cane,” she told me. “He speaks of you every day of his life.” All was well in the world, according to her. They were happy and had plenty and never wanted for anything. Mama was only entertaining me; it was clear that things were not as good as she claimed. I knowed my mama better than that and could tell even by her tight little letters when something was wrong. Daddy wasn’t getting any better, and Mama wasn’t doing good either. I don’t know how I knowed; I just did. I could see it between the lines of the letter.

  When the roads were so impassable that Saul couldn’t even get to the mill, I let my work go and didn’t awake Birdie—who would sleep all day if you would let her. Me and Saul would lay in the bed until far up in the morning, talking. He told me about the lumber camp in Laurel County, and of friends he had made there, and sometimes about his youth. It seemed he wanted me to know everything about himself all of a sudden. I had little to say in return. He’d watch me, thinking on why I was so silent.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked one day as we laid in the bed. Snow thudded at the windows, and the wind whistled around the house.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to add a little laugh to my voice. I wrapped my legs around his and laid my head on his chest so he couldn’t see my face. His body was wa
rm.

  “You’ve been quiet ever since I got back,” he said. I could hear his words from his mouth, but also from his chest. “It’s like we’ve switched places.”

  “Maybe we have,” I said. But I didn’t know what to say after that.

  Then one morning I woke up to the sound of rain on the roof. Thunder rumbled close by, and I could feel its noise in the floor-boards beneath my feet. Rain fell at a slant, unbroken lines of silver that hit the earth with so much force that I watched for pockmarks in the dirt as I stood by my window. Birdie did not stir as I run from the house. I went out onto the porch, and even there, under its cover, I could feel the mist off of the rain. I stepped off the porch and stood in the yard next to my little redbud tree. My nightgown stuck to me and growed heavy, but I felt light. I felt that if I tried hard enough, I might be able to fly. I leaned back my head and opened my mouth. The rain held the taste of spring.

  SPRINGTIME SEEMED TO stir some kind of ancient desire in Saul. He started talking about going to church, and I didn’t know how to feel about this possibility. He spoke of it constantly, looking up the road toward the church house as if I was the only thing keeping him from joining the congregation. I had no argument with the church, but I had no desire to go there, either. I could see no point in it, really. I was perfectly happy worshiping God in my own way and saw no reason to allow a preacher to tell me how to live. I didn’t like the idea of being inside while worshiping, either. At our Quaker services, the family had simply set together for a few minutes, praying or thinking silently. After some time had passed, Daddy would stand and say, “This is the day the Lord hath made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it.” Then we would start cooking the Sunday supper. Our meetings were always held outside—even when it rained, we would all crowd on the porch—and there had been no sound but that of the world around us.

  If we joined the church, there would be no more dances on our yard. There would be no evenings of playing rummy together after Birdie had gone to sleep, as even a deck of cards was seen as blasphemy by the Pentecostal church. The moonshine would not be on the kitchen shelf. And the congregation would surely frown on my friendship with Serena, the only divorced woman anybody knowed of. There was just too much living that was forbidden by the church.

  Esme come down to talk to me about it, too. On Good Friday she come to me in the gloaming. When she stepped up onto the porch, even the birds were quiet, as if they knowed that this was the time between night and day when all things are still. Peach light stood on the horizon.

  I had just got Birdie out of the bathtub and was brushing her hair out in the front room. I had left the door open for the good spring air, and when I glanced up, there was Esme, watching us from behind the screen door. Her face was lost to shadows, but the remaining daylight stood out on the yard beyond her.

  “Hidy,” I called. “Come on in.”

  Esme didn’t move, though. “I just come down to see if you all would go to church with me on Easter. I can’t stand the thought of going by myself this year.”

  Aaron had always gone with her on Easter Sunday. It had been the one thing he had never refused her. Saul must’ve gone, too, before he had married me.

  “We’re having dinner on the ground, and Easter Sunday is always a pretty service,” she said. I was surprised by how humble she was acting. I knowed Esme hated to ask anybody for anything, even so much as offering an invitation to church.

  I seen that I was not going to be able to refuse her. “I reckon we could,” I said, and kept on brushing Birdie’s hair. “Won’t you come in?”

  Esme acted like she hadn’t heard me. She stayed on the other side of the screen door. “That baby needs to go to church and learn about the Lord.”

  “I talk about God to her,” I said, “all the time. She knows.”

  Esme put a hand flat against the screen door. “You’ll go, then?” she asked.

  “I ain’t got no new dress for Birdie. Nary’n that she ain’t wore before.” I laid the brush down and patted Birdie’s head to let her know I was done. I walked on over to the screen door and went to open it, but Esme didn’t step back. In the strange light of dusk, Esme looked altogether different to me. I had noticed it before, the night she had stepped out to sing “Foreign Lander,” but now it was worse. She was ailing. Standing there, she wouldn’t look me in the eye. I felt like Esme knowed everything that had happened, that Aaron laid up there on the other side of the mountain.

  “You take me into town tomorrow and we’ll get us some fabric, then,” she said, and it seemed the notion of making a new dress brightened her somewhat. “I’d like to make Birdie a new dress.”

  “Well,” I said. “We sure will.” I put my hand on the door handle again. “Come on in and set a little while. I got some coffee on the warmer plate.”

  “Naw,” Esme said, sliding her hands into the twin pockets on the front of her apron. “I guess I’ll head up the house. I’m going to lay down early tonight.”

  I opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch as she turned away.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then,” I said. “Everything all right?”

  “Yeah,” Esme said without turning around. “I’m just tired’s all.”

  I stood on the porch a minute, watching night start to roll in. Already it was cooling off, the air turning damp. Inside the house, Birdie was singing. Way up on the mountain Aaron was playing “Charlie’s Neat” on his banjo. It slid down the ridge to me like a wind. I could hear him:

  Charlie he’s a magic man,

  He feeds the girls rock candy.

  I willed this sound to stop, as I knowed it wasn’t real. It was just my mind playing tricks. I let out a long, jagged breath. Sometimes I felt like I wouldn’t make it through another night. I thought my guilt might smother me to death while I slept.

  Then I noticed the new leaves on the redbud tree. The purple buds were being pushed away to make way for the leaves. I walked out to the tree and put my finger to a leaf, smooth like it was coated with wax. I could feel its veins, wet and round. I had always found comfort in the leaves, in their silence. They were like a parchment that holds words of wisdom. Simply holding them in my hand gave me some of the peace a tree possesses. To be like that—to just be—that’s the most noble thing of all.

  SUNDAY WE WALKED up the holler road to the church. It was warm enough that I sweated in my stiff dress. I had refused to wear a hat, even though Esme said everyone did on Easter Sunday, and the sun was hot on my hair. Next to the church, the road was lined with gigs and wagons and horses that nuzzled at the grass. A few cars were parked in the sandy spot near the church door. There was a great flurry of people making their way toward the church. Men helped their wives out of the gigs. They all had jonquils pinned to their dresses or hats. There was a bell high up on a pole, and a little boy pulled at the rope beneath it, the metal sound of the bell echoing against the mountainsides.

  The preacher stood at the door, pumping everyone’s hand. He was skinny but had great jowls that quivered as he shook his head in a big way, as if to let everybody know how welcome they were. I never had liked him. He had acted so put-out at our wedding, as if it had pained him to travel there. His wife stood beside him, a tiny bird who smiled with pinched lips and held her purse in both hands against her chest. She nodded politely to everyone after they had shook the pastor’s hand, but she didn’t speak a word. I wondered if the pastor had told her not to.

  When we walked up, he put both hands on Esme’s and said, “My favorite one.” Birdie was holding on to Esme’s dress tail, and he bent and patted her atop the head. He slapped Saul on the back the way all men did to one another, laughing in such a loud way that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I was surprised by how clammy his hands were. His handshake was loose and light, as if it might easily break in two.

  “I’m sure glad to see you here,” he said. He was a whole different man here at his church. “I had a whole slew of Indians at the last chu
rch I pastored, and they knowed how to get the Spirit on them. I knowed when I joined you all in marriage that you’d eventually get up here.”

  I smiled, for want of anything else to do. Daddy had always hated being called an Indian. When he was little, he had been forced into a white school where they called him an Indian and put soap in his mouth for speaking Cherokee. They had whipped him for writing in his own language.

  I wanted to be nice to the preacher and overlook his ignorance. “Well, it took us long enough, didn’t it?” I said.

  The pastor’s wife eyed me over her glasses. “Hidy,” she said in a voice no bigger than a squeak. Her lips barely moved, and I could see now that the woman had been speaking to everyone who had passed by her.

  The church was filled with noise. People were roaming all around, leaning over the backs of pews to shake hands. Women hugged one another, and children set together in big clumps. Everybody spoke or nodded to us. I have to admit it felt good to be amongst so much fellowship.

  Esme took her place on the second pew and we all squeezed in beside her. As soon as the pastor got to the pulpit, the noise faded away pew by pew until it reached the front, following his progress up the aisle.

  “This is the day our Savior arose!” the pastor shouted, and everyone jumped to their feet, clapping or raising their hands over their heads. They shouted, “Praise God!” and “Jesus!” over and over until finally the clamor died down. “And look what a day he has gived to us! What a beautiful day!”

  There was much hollering and clapping and amens. I couldn’t help but to look around. This was all so new to me.

  A whole crowd of women went to the front of the church. One of them spoke the verses, and the rest joined in. Soon everybody in the church was singing: men with great booming voices, and women who sung high and lilting. It all blended together perfect, the way a storm has all the right sounds in place at the right time. The windows were opened and sunlight fell through them in bright rectangles. The music was beautiful to my ears—so beautiful, this joining of so many voices, that I felt the urge to cry but didn’t.