Chapter 5

October came to pass in fog and tones of droning rain. Muffled trees stood in wet leaves along farm paths. Ellen, a gray shape in the mist, was moving from clinking house lights to the obscurity of the woodshed and barns. Christian had not come for three weeks. At first she had waited in profound anger, eager to renounce him. But in the autumn sun of following days, while the two ringing notes of the partridge called back and forth, loneliness tempered her wrath and she loved him indulgently as the source of her pain and its witness.

Today she was going again to the rail fence along the road where joe-pye-weeds drooped coarse-toothed leaves. She was wearing a red stocking cap, her long coat had pendulous lapels and a wide belt that fastened on her hips with two heavy buttons. As she passed the grapevines where leaves hung chilled, a flock of crows arose, making nasal resentful barks. She waited an hour. Unending rain was falling and small gusts wove about. Finally she went to the work Anton had set, sorting and shucking corn. Later she absently stroked the alert ears and silken hair of the kid Rhodie, nearly as large as its dam now. “Reckon he’s with Sabatha Withers. Pleasuring as he did with me.” She clothed her wrath, embellished it. “Happen she’ll drag him to a priest. All his days he’ll dwell on me and what he forfeited.”

Her mind turned to when she was nine or ten and, living in fantasy and wishes, would try new ways to walk through the sun-washed fields where grass stood high. It would seem that crowds of people lined both sides of the way she took. They came to see how grand she held her head and to talk among themselves of the noble way of Lady Ellen. “I aim to hold me high and wed a rich man.” She spoke aloud in the stable. But she didn’t believe it and the anger burned. She went to the house where lamps flickered in the gloom, and Anton stacked a fire in the parlor, filled the woodbin and split lighter-wood with a deft hand.

Ten days passed. On a splendid windy morning in November, Ellen was clearing garden debris and gathering cabbages and root crops in heaps for winter storage. She faced her dilemma, rebellious. “If it be so, I’ll drown myself or it in the pond when it’s born. And if he’s run off, I’ll seek him out. I’ll knife him, I will.” She piled cabbage heads in a bushel basket and dumped them in the cellar storage bin. Her secret dwelled within her like a hidden wound. “I say, Jack, what will I do?”

That afternoon Amanda York came up the porch steps and knocked. “Hickory mast is laying thick in Bailey’s Woods, Mrs. Gaddy. Can Ellie and Frankie come nutting?”

The three girls walked a mile down the road to the woods, carrying empty baskets. Amanda had black eyes and black shining hair. She was rosy and lively. “Ask your pa if you can go once to the husking bee. This Saturday.”

“He ne’er would brook it, Mandy.” Frankie was shaking her head.

“There’ll be a sight of folks. From Bethel way and down from Seven Mile Run.”

“Because Pa don’t favor us socializing,” Frankie added.

Amanda tossed her braid. “And a fiddler and a spread of eats.”

“You know Sabatha Withers?” Ellen flushed in the asking.

“I’ll say I do. She’s wild. Boys flock after her like dogs on a rabbit.”

“What?” cried Frankie.

“She sleeps around. Things like that.”

“My.”

“What’s she look like?” asked Ellen.

“Oh, light-set, and got yellow hair like yours, Ellie.”

“Why doesn’t she have a baby,” Frankie asked, “if she sleeps around?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“It’s a mystery,” Frankie sighed.

“Did that Lily Garrett tell you what she did?” Amanda asked.

“You mean sending for that stuff to make her breasts grow?”

“Yes. And what happened.”

“What?”

“Well, she wanted it,” Amanda whispered, “for she’s boy-crazy, Lily is. She’s terrible.”

“I know. She told us.” Frankie giggled. “Men like you big, she said.”

“Well, she waited all summer to hear. We couldn’t figure why it ne’er came. I studied that her pa had got hold of the package some way.”

“Say. Did he?”

“No, last week it came. Just an old envelope. And there was a picture on a card of a man’s hand. It said underneath, Try This. Lily got scared.”

“She should ne’er have sent off, Mandy,” Frankie cried.

“Say, has that Withers girl got a boy friend?” Ellen was asking.

“She’s got plenty, Ellie. There’s always one to take her to doings.”

“Now what if Lily’s papa’d seen it,” Frankie said. “That picture and those words.”

“Wish I could go to that husking bee,” said Ellen. “I’ve got a deal of a desire to go. I might cross my pa and slip out this once.”

“Oh Ellie.” Frankie’s voice was the cheep of a frightened bird. “Don’t say that.”

“Obey thy father and mother.” Amanda spoke cheerfully as they were entering the woods. “Now maybe he’ll say yes this time, Ellie.” They began to gather hickory mast that carpeted the ground. When the baskets were full they walked to Amanda’s home, a saddlebag log house set in an apple orchard. They left two baskets in the passageway between the cabins and climbed to an upstairs room. They shucked Amanda’s nuts, spreading them with brown-stained hands on a carpet of straw. From the rafters hung strings of small ear corn with white pointed kernels that would pop over a fire. And there was a drop cord overhead with a carbon bulb, for the Yorks had electricity.

The sisters took their leave and walked home with the laden baskets. The evening whippoorwills were starting their spasmodic carping. Ellen said, “I’ll make a way to go to that husking bee.”

But at the end of the week Anton brought news so she forgot all about it. He had hauled grain and surplus root crops, Hubbard squashes and pumpkins to Bethel, returning in late afternoon with ground flour, meal, and kitchen and farm supplies. “Saw the new smithy, Troy Hatfield, and got the welding done. That share will hold now. And he gave me outright a great piece of hide for leather stripping, just for that heap of pumpkins Frankie planted. Shaw.” The man was growing genial, his journey a success. He pushed back his chair and strode to the door, spit his quid into the bushes. He wiped his face with a powerful arm, came back to sup coffee noisily and consume chunks of Ellen’s brown dripping-cake. He was turning to her. “Troy gave me news for your ears, girl. You mind that froward young fellow hired to Dutchman Brinker? The one that sassed me? Well, he took off in a sudden. Dutchman had a time finding a new hand. This one’s brought a wife with him, so he’ll not be traipsing about with young maids. Hum.”

“Did smithy have an idea where he went, Pa?”

“You pining after that poor trash Brinker hires?”

“I’ve got a right to ask.”

“You trifling with me?”

“No, Pa.”

“You have to put in your two cents. The fellow’s pa died. Troy says Dutchman was right plagued at having to pay wages out on a Sabbath. That’ll put a good Lutheran in hell, I allow. Haw.”

“He ne’er liked his pa nor that kind of city work.” Ellen was by the door, lingering.

“You got any more on your mind? Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”

Ellen went to take from its pen the gray rabbit Christian had brought her. She carried it to the edge of the field and put it down. “Go fend for yourself like I’ve got to. Look out for the hungry foxes and weasels.” She watched it hop away, then went to her upstairs room. She hunted in the wood trunk for paper and an envelope.

Dear Christian,

Smithy told Pa you left these parts. The sky is heavy and gray. Maybe it will come on a snow. I call to mind the hours we spent by the strawberry bed. Now I think winter is come. I would that you wrote me how you are getting on.

Ellen Gaddy

She sealed the envelope, addressing it to Mr. Christian Ay, Carl Brinker Homestead, Route 4, Bethel, Ky., send to new address.

Down in the woods the air was still and weighted. Pinched clouds were banking above the swollen land. The red dog fox crept to his post overlooking the shadowed water. His eyes tensed as he spied the old Muscovy duck napping, head under wing, amid brown rush stalks. He struck noiseless. Thrashing wings lashed in a frenzied struggle but the needle teeth found the jugular and blood was spattered on the rushes. Later Ellen called again and again and there was no answering rush of wings. “You’d ne’er come to the safe yard. Reckon some varmint caught you.” She tossed the ear of corn to the tame fowl in the chicken yard.

Her letter was returned by the mail carrier. She hid it under her apron. On its face was scrawled: return to sender, no address known. C. Brinker. She took it up to the attic and laid it unopened in the small trunk. She stood looking out the gable window as drifting snow made the world grow small and old familiar shapes became strange and new.

Down Sweetincreek Road in mid-December Anton was driving the wagon to mass in Millville. The lightweight buckboard was unsuited for these winter days and the women rode in the wagon bed shrouded with rugs. A crowd of frightened birds moved and swooped across the sky like a giant amoeba. The pale sun was melting the snowfall into slush. The horses snorted, exhaling a vapor, tramped in the ruts of the road, hurling red mud in clods from their iron shoes. Anton was complaining, “Wish hit could have waited till Monday to thaw. This is a rough piece of road.” He clucked to the team. “Reckon we’ll be late again to mass, Frankie? Here it is Advent time once more.”

“Christmas is but two weeks off, Pa.”

Ellen was praying silently, “Holy Queen, keep him from remembering to send us to confession this week. I’ll not tell it to a priest. I’ll go to hell and burn first. I’m in a sorry strait, now.”

Anton was fastening the team and preceding his family into the square clapboard building half filled with people and heated by a huge black stove at one side. He took one of the rear pews. The heavy clothing rustled, the plank floor creaked. Anton tugged his bulky fur cap off, thrust it behind him on the seat. The women were kneeling at the low bench in their long coats, their caps and boots. They crossed themselves. The priest was murmuring at the altar, his server on his knees. Intimidated by habit and example, Ellen inclined her head. She heard the sonorous chant, “O Thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep, alleluia. Stir up, O Lord, Thy might and come to save us. Who art Thou? I am the voice of one crying in the desert.” She made the sign with her hand, desolate. The priest began to tell off the canon of the mass. He washed his fingers, incense drifted, the signal bell tinkled. Folk shifted and whispered; singly and in groups they left their winter covering on the benches, came with bowed heads to the altar, hands in ancient attitude of prayer, to receive from paten and cup the Body and Blood. Say to the faint-hearted, fear not. It chafed within Ellen, uncomforted. She arose with the rest when it was over. And in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness grasped it not. The holy man was striding away, the people began to depart in a disturbance of noise and bodies. Ellen touched the water in the granite basin as she walked after her mother and sister.

Anton dipped his head, curt, to those he knew, stopped without the door to speak with N. J. Bilberry. The women waited, Maria whispering to Mrs. Bilberry, fleshy-faced and cheerful. At Anton’s nod they climbed back into the wagon and he took the reins. They jolted down the road. The earth lay dank-sweated, old furrows exposed. Black cottonwood trees were guarding the ditches. “N. J.’s wheat froze out,” the man commented briefly.

“Tinie says there’s chills and fever going about,” Maria told him. “And Ioway Ashby has married a man from the south. He’s thirty-one years old. Ioway was but twelve last June.”

“I heard,” Frankie cried, “he sent off for a poppet doll for her, dressed in a bride veil.”

“Ioway Ashby’s not inclined to give up her dolls yet,” Maria said.

“Now dogwood roots are near as good as quinine for chills and fever,” Anton was saying.

“Ioway’s ma told Tinie they’d begged at her since summer to let them marry. So she figured they just as well. I say, that’s a sight young for robbing the cradle.”

Under cover of the wagon’s rumbling, Ellen whispered, reciting, “Mother of Mercy, our life our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.”

Frankie pulled the rug about her boots. “It’s powerful cold. What you doing, Ellie?”

“I’m thinking. Sam says if you have a blade of five-finger grass to carry about no one can deny you what you ask. I don’t believe him. Wonder if there’s some in the fields now?” Ellen turned her eyes uncertainly to the future, where somehow she must form a plan.

Anton received a letter the next day. “Hit’s from your Uncle Garland. Says he’s coming in a week’s time for Christmas this year. Hum. We’ll see what he thinks of your piano-playing now, Frankie. And how you’ve grown so fair.”

“Oh Pa.”

The man straightened his back, looked out the window. “Bear in mind, one more Christmas and you’ll be going up to that city with him. That’s Anton Gaddy’s youngen, folks’ll say.”

“Chicago sounds so far off, Pa. Will Uncle be glad for me to come?” Frankie smoothed the brightened hair that hung about her narrow shoulders.

“We’ll butcher tomorrow. Hear, ooman?” Anton said to Maria.

“Yes,” she assented, “and it’s just come on the dark of the moon. It’s right to butcher.”

“You know I don’t hold by that. But my brother dotes on your blood pudding and peppered headcheese. Sam and I’ll fix to prepare right away.” He marched out.

“If you butcher in the light of the moon,” Maria told her daughters, “it’ll all drindle away while it’s frying. Just cracklings’ll be left. The grease’ll go rancid till you’ve got to make it up in soap.”

“I know,” tittered Frankie, “and that soap will turn the clothes yellow.”

“That’s a fact,” said Maria. “Don’t you laugh. My pap and mam e’er went by the moon. It’s natural.”

“Will Uncle Garland say I’m fair, Ellie?” Frankie appealed to her.

“I reckon.”

“Are you cross, Ellie?”

“No.”

“Well you sure act sick then. Doesn’t she, Ma?”

Ellen, who found tears started easily now, who was wary of her sudden sieges of self-pity, was running from the room. Again she dipped the pen.

Mr. Christian Ay,

There is a need for me to speak with you. I wish you were still hired to Brinker. I fear you have forgot me and this is but a striving after wind. Could you make a way to write or send word?

Ellen Gaddy Millville, Ktcky.

This she addressed, Mr. Christian Ay, Care of Ay’s Store, Louisville, Ktcky.

She mused, near suffocating in the loneliness. Had she led him on as Christian had declared? Had she sinned? Her brows contracted and she searched again the halls of memory for meanings. Surely she had known to fear that which befell. Here in the countryside tales were constantly bruited and old songs sung of fallen virgins and light young men. The Bible related dire warnings and horrid punishments meted out to defiled maids. She had led him to their sin then. But that wasn’t so. I didn’t knowing lead him on. I wasn’t a wanton. There came to her mind the woodchucks Anton trapped. A shotgun often didn’t penetrate the small thick skulls so steel traps were set in their underground paths. If a creature blundered and felt the sudden grip, it would strive with its greatest strength. And if it could not tear free, it backed into its den, pulling the trap after. There it gnawed its own leg above the metal jaws. It destroyed a part of its flesh, knowing it was a way.

When the next morning was just made, two scalded hog carcasses were hanging from the sourwood scaffold. The blood had been caught in a bowl and taken to the kitchen for boiling and seasoning. The great white wrinkled heads were on the porch in a red-daubed washtub. “If there was a ooman with child about,” Sam grunted as they were hoisting the scraped bodies by gambrel sticks thrust through the hamstrings, “we’d have to take care to cover this mess. Butchering blood on the earth marks a child.”

“I don’t have those worries any more.” Anton tossed the liver and kidneys and sweetbreads in the pan Ellen brought out to them.

The fire was dying under the iron cauldron. Soon hams were piled in a heap along with the sagging shoulders and sides on a lye-scrubbed plank. The sausage-making began. Sam was scraping the inverted intestines preliminary to stuffing them. He stopped to hone his knife on a whetstone he carried in his pocket, spat on it for lubrication. “My old ooman came back last night. First thing Eadie did was boil up hot mustard water and set her feet in it. She chewed up a sourwood twig to make her a snuff brush. Give me a dipping, Samuel, she says, I’m tuckered.” He sat back thoughtful. “For Gawd, my house was a lonely place against that old hen’s return.”

Anton sliced chunks of meat savagely, the razor-sharp knife whipping close to his finger tips. He held his silence, fed the pork into the grinder.

In the kitchen the women were preparing in their fashion for the celebration ahead. Anton had given Ellen coins with which to buy sugar when she did her trading, and for spices and raisins to put in the holiday cakes. In this season when his brother came for the annual visit, Anton would have no stinting. “Girl,” he said to her, “my ma used to make a pale holytide cake. There were whites of eggs beat in bowls and it was thick with nuts and sugared fruits. Not black like those strong sorghum ones you-all make. Hum.” He nodded, complacent.

Ellen was assenting, eager. “I’ll ask Mrs. Love. Could be she’s learned the rule of such a cake, Pa.”

“And when you’re trading, go down of an evening when priest is holding hours for confession. Your uncle be due on Saturday, and I’ll have you all at the communion rail when he’s here, proper pious.”

Before walking the muddy road to Millville in the cloudy darkened late afternoon, Ellen went to her room. She was binding her waist tight with a length of cloth. “I can’t see nothing yet, but Stacey Love might.”

In the confessional box, she whispered to the young priest. “Bless me, Father Tompert. I confess to God and you that I’ve sinned. My last confession was Easter.” She despaired. It’s all made up of falseness. I’ve no right to be here.

“Confess your sins since then, child.”

“I took God’s name in vain. One time I did truly hate my pa.”

“Have you had any impure thoughts, my child?”

“No.”

“If you have any of these kind of thoughts you must do your best to banish them. Are you truly sorry for your sins?”

“I am, Father.”

She went to kneel in a pew, forbearing to recite the penance prayers the priest had assigned to her. Instead she asked the Virgin to have pity, to understand why she was mute to Father Tompert for the sake of Anton’s pride. She was thus driven, with a measure of courage, to rejecting the rituals bestowed on her since a cross was hung about her throat as a baby, since she first held the beads and lisped the Credo. And praying to Mary, Ellen emerged with her as a personal god. She grasped the blue-gowned symbol in her need as if it were flesh and blood and could wield an influence on her fate. She denied the immense father figure of God without debating it.

In coming days she would meet the mail carrier in his Model T, take back her second letter and place it with the other in the trunk. She at last put aside the hope of finding Christian Ay.

By Friday, cakes and tarts, breads, cheeses and dried fruit pies were overflowing from the pantry shelves. Hams and sidemeat were curing in the smokehouse, sausages strung lavish from the shed eaves. There were crocks of fried meat packed in white fat, as well as headcheese, liverwurst, and tins of fresh lard. In the hot kitchen, Maria was baking breads and biscuits in the newly-blacked range, vaguely wakened in the prospect of a visitor. She spoke to Ellen, “Get wax candles when you go by Love’s next time, girl. The tallow ones ain’t suited for Mester Garland Gaddy.”

Frankie was at the long table, a basket of butternuts and walnuts on the floor by her. She was cracking them on a sadiron with a blow of an old hammer head. She looked up, “You’re right peaked, Ellie. Are you ailing?”

“I’ll hunt out some of that bloodroot tonic,” Maria said, “if you got the complaint. It’ll make new blood.”

“I’d as lief you’d sing again,” Frankie was saying. “And you used to cut up so. Seems you’ve given it up.”

Ellen, startled, burned her hand on the iron pan she was taking from the oven. She shook her wrist to ease the seep of pain.

“Go smear yellow soap on it,” her mother said, “it’ll draw out the heat.”

Ellen rubbed on the soap, blinking her eyes. She sang to hide the tears and to hold her tongue from blurting her trouble.

If I had known before I courted That love had been so hard to win I’d have locked my heart with the keys of golden And pinned it down with a silver pin

“That’s too lamenting, Ellie. Sing that one Penny used to. About that Minnie.”

Hush little Minnie and don’t say a word Papa’s going to buy me a mocking bird It can whistle and it can sing It can do most anything

They were making ready for the guest coming. Calico was hung across one end of the downstairs bedroom to form a separate chamber in which Garland would sleep. A chair was placed by the bed and a stone-topped table. In its base was a chamber pot, and on top a crockery pitcher with pink roses glazed on its surface set in a matching basin. A cake of store soap lay in a dish, a towel folded beside it. They ripped the bed tick open, removed the old stuffing, and filled it with soft wheat straw. The one feather pallet was aired and placed on the mattress, and over all they spread muslin sheets and their best quilts.

That night Ellen was in a chair in the warm parlor, her back aching from the long hours, a piece of mending in her hand. Dark had come on, the lamp was throwing feeble quivering shadows. Anton was holding the Bible and his lips moved. He raised his eyes, studied the image of Joseph alone on the table. He spoke, abrupt, “Where’s the Virgin Mary that stood there with Joseph? She be broke, I vow.”

Ellen looked up in alarm. “I took her to the loft-room, Pa. What with holytide, I thought it would please you if I prayed to her, pious-like.”

“Well, I allow you can keep her for a spell. But she’ll not be broke, girl.”

“No, Pa. I’ll take care.” She arose. “Reckon I’ll go to bed. Coming, Frankie?”

He stopped them. “I’ll say the prayer to Michael once for this family. Get down, you-all.”

On their knees the women were waiting, their shadows cast like gentle giants on the wall. The man knelt by the lamp and his specter engulfed theirs. “Holy Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our safeguard against the snares of the devil. Thou, Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits that wander through the world seeking the ruination of souls.”

The temperature dropped in the night. As they were beginning the morning chores, whitefrost covered the land. The remote stars were cold and challenging. Ellen shivered, feeling her frailty. “What does it matter? One soul like me. I’m but a grain in a field of wheat. Who’s to heed if I be lone or have a sin to burn me?”

She was closing the woodshed door. Her two goats got up in the half-light by the stone wall. Their beards twitched as they chewed in unison, their hair stood out woolly. “Why did I e’er take up with the careless love of Christian Ay?”

She was putting bread crusts and salt and soybeans from her pocket in the wood trough. She laid her hands on the animals’ soft necks. “Here’s some linseed meal for richness. You feel the storm coming?”

She went to get a bucket of tepid water that had stood by the kitchen range all night, carried it to the barnyard fowl. They were huddling together, feathers ruffled, on the pole roosts. She threw cracked corn on the dirt floor of their shed, and the birds hopped down one by one to eat, singing and crooning over the food. “Tonight I’ll mix a sprinkle of red pepper in your wet mash to warm your craws while you sleep.” Tending the creatures of the farm, Ellen took comfort and so forgot herself.