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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781559212717 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Beaufort Books, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 07/12/1999 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 190 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.36(w) x 7.86(h) x 0.84(d) |
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Chapter One
Hadley, Nealy, Gus
I dreamed there'd been other children, but mother ate them. Maybe they turned into fish or animals or birds before she did.
"Maybe berries," Gus said. Nealy chased him through the yard until mother yelled at us through the window. "Baby eater," Gus said when she couldn't hear.
Gus found a dead bird. He pulled out its feathers, saying the bible verses we had to learn in church. Nealy made wings from the feathers for our fingers. I stuck mine to my thumbs. Nealy used her little fingers because they were the lightest and her hands could fly easier. Gus taped his feathers to his middle finger just like you'd think a boy would.
July Fourth
You think I come to give peace?
I say, no, rather division.
Luke 12:51
Gus, my brother, came in late the night before. The house hardly settled when I heard Aunt Mary Corder in her room. I listened to her prayers as the sun came up, watched the shine of light on the wide plank floor under the door between our rooms. I knew Aunt Mary prayed on her knees at an old chair by the north window. Other times, I heard her in the attic.
"Cold and snow come from the north," she said, "trial and sorrow. I always face the north." When Aunt Mary prayed, the house shook and the floors trembled. No one but Pastor Hill could pray like Aunt Mary.
Nealy, my sister, was asleep beside me. She had peace with God,slept in the crook of his staff. Never strayed. I turned my head toward her. Mother was on a cot at the foot of the bed, leaving the guest room for dad and his brother, my Uncle Farley Williges. My brother, Gus, was in there too.
We had come to Hammergies from Kansas City, Missouri, for the summer. Dad and Farley came from Kansas City for the Fourth. Aunt Mary kept them at guest's length, though she was a Christian. And I knew when she looked at me, I was in the guest room with them.
"Mother had been warned," Aunt Mary said. "The Williges family wasn't Christian." But mother married him at the altar of Hammergies Church before God and the wedding guests. The same church where great-grandfather and great-grandmother Corder had their children baptized when they came from the Carolina Piedmont.
Aunt Mary prayed in a hush now. "The Lord is a rock," I heard, "a fortress, our deliverer and strength." But I couldn't call upon the Lord like Aunt Mary. I stayed in bed after Nealy and mother and the others were downstairs.
When I went down, Uncle Farley sat on a worn stepstool in a corner of the kitchen. He propped his elbow on his knee and held a bowl of oatmeal and strawberries he had cooked himself. He had to be off before the rest of us could gather for breakfast. Farley was the photographer for the Kansas City Chronicle; my dad was a reporter. Kansas City was forty miles south of Hammergies. It was a city while Hammergies was nothing more than a country town, "where our wagon had its shed," Farley said. He was after the July Fourth in Hammergies. He sat like a bonfire in Aunt Mary's kitchen. The wooden fan circled on the ceiling like an awkward pelican.
Farley also would have stayed aloft from Aunt Mary's soured disposition if he could, his cameras over his shoulder.
"Abraham didn't stagger at the promise of God," Aunt Mary said to Farley, "neither will I. Just mix your experiences with the word of God," but Farley was off before she finished.
Dad drank coffee in the dining room with his newspaper articles from last year's July Fourth in Hammergies. I tripped over the hook rug between the dining room and kitchen again. Farley turned and looked at me as he went out the door. "Want to come, Hadley?" He asked.
Our July Fourth was always carded in the Kansas City Chronicle—from the quiet country morning to the bonfire and fireworks at dusk. "The Hammergies Reune," Farley called it to the consternation of Aunt Mary—"the Sardine Bake, the Cornwallis." I had gone to it since I was born.
"Hadley hasn't had breakfast," mother said. "None of us has." Farley let the back screen slam. Aunt Mary's kitchen was like cowhide—pinto brown and creme, with her spatterware on the cupboard and chartruse print potholders on the wall.
"I want to go with Farley. Just give me toast." I snapped at mother. "Farley!" I called out the door. He hesitated at the jeep. "I'm coming."
"You're not going!" Mother screamed.
"I am."
"Let her go," dad said from the dining room, and I knew she would turn on him when I was gone.
Farley drove toward the country. I looked at him a moment. I could be like Uncle Farley if I didn't hear the barb of Aunt Mary's prayers. After several blocks of stores which were closed for the Fourth, and some houses, we were in the country.
I wanted to talk to Farley as we passed the barns and hayfields. "I want to run like you, Farley," I would have said, but Farley was an artist with his cameras and I couldn't talk. He waited a while along the road with his pipe, watching the farmers at their chores before going to the Cornwallis. I saw the piles of uprooted windbreaks—the rows of trees between fields that kept the wind from the soil. They had been cleared for field-space and burned along the road.
"Now the wind can have the dirt again," Aunt Mary had said. "You depart from the faith, Hadley," she warned, "and you'll be just like the fields open to the elements."
I could feel the coming heat of the day as Farley drove to the covered bridge, not used any longer, but posted with an historical marker. "You take the bridge every year," I said. "It isn't even about Independence Day."
"It's the solemn morning before the revolution, the Civil War—any battle—" Farley said, "—even the Hammergies church supper on July Fourth. People's minds are transient, Hadley. No one remembers history," he answered.
I stood under the serape of covered bridge where the union cavalry had crossed the stream. "It echoes," I said.
"Hello there, Hadley," he called from the far end of the bridge.
"Hello down there, Farley Williges, Uncle Wiggley Williges," I called back. "I'm hungry, Farley," I told him.
"Wait," he answered.
I sneezed with hayfever, and felt my head begin to pound. But it wasn't time yet for hayfever. Farley knelt on the bank before a sag of rope across the creek. "Roof cover protected the timbers," I read the historical marker, "—skittish horses across the rushing stream. 1871." Over a hundred years ago. The surging prairie and torrents from the north. My headache consumed me and I went back to the jeep.
When Farley came, I felt sick to my stomach. "I remember the bridge picture," I said to him. I felt flushed with heat and the fear of another headache. The ones I had had since I was a child.
"We'll go on a short way," he said.
"I didn't take time to fix toast, Farley." I said. "I get sick when I don't eat. I think I have early hayfever, and a headache."
In Polo, Missouri, he stopped and I got breakfast, though it was nearly lunch. My head pounded and Farley got some aspirin from the waitress. I jumped as he handed me the glass. There were boys in the street with firecrackers. The noise startled me as I ate.
"You really have one," he said.
"You know I get headaches, Farley."
He took the boys' pictures as I finished my milk at the table and we started back to Hammergies. Farley knew the country and towns we passed. We talked little as he studied the road. People took the Chronicle just for his pictures, Farley said.
"Do you feel better yet?" Farley asked.
"Not much," I said, fighting the bang in my head. "Why do you stay at Aunt Mary's?" I asked after a while.
"For the feeling of family I guess, even ours. Miss Mary Corder keeps my pictures stirred," he said as the road rushed by the jeep.
"I wish she wasn't so much older than you, Farley," I said. "You could have married her like dad married her sister."
"Never," Farley said. "I'll leave Missionary Ridge to them."
"You're sensitive to the farm country—"
"You don't have to be from a place to know it, Hadley." He checked the cameras beside him on the seat and I hoped he would hurry back to Hammergies.
"Come to church with us this afternoon," I said, holding my hand to my forehead. "I go with them."
"No." Farley answered. "I heard Mary Corder shoveling coal in her room this morning."
"I told you, Farley—the farms from the church window—"
"No." He said curtly.
My stomach turned with the rises in the road and my head felt dizzy. My throat tightened in the occasional smell of smoke from the burning windbreaks and Farley's pipe—I knew I was going to be sick.
"Stop, Farley!" I said as my head swirled with the road beside the jeep.
Farley stopped and I barely reached the ditch when I got sick. My head pounded harder—I stood at the ditch for a moment, shaking.
"I want to go back to Aunt Mary's, Farley, I don't feel good."
"I can see that," he said.
Mother and Aunt Mary were in the kitchen when I came in the house. Gus left the ice cream freezer in the backyard and followed me in.
"I've got a headache," I said to mother. "I'm going to bed."
"But the supper—" mother said. I saw the baskets and jars on the cupboard—the chicken, green beans and Aunt Mary's biscuits. Nealy washed the strawberries.
"I've already eaten," I said.
"Where?" Aunt Mary demanded. "At Genny's?" She answered her own question. "I knew Genevieve would have her cafe open. And the burning of the windbreaks on the Fourth," Aunt Mary motioned to the window.
"Seems a fitting day," dad said.
"Would you stay out of what doesn't concern you?" Mother said to him. "Hadley, you disgust me."
"Mother, I'm sick." I yelled at her, and my head beat so hard I held to the wall. Gus stared at me and I felt my anger rise.
"Settle down, Ann," dad said to mother. Aunt Mary and Nealy were quiet. I knew they were probably praying like they always did.
"Leave me alone," mother started on dad.
I went upstairs to bed. I could hear them downstairs yelling. I remembered it since the crib. Soon Gus would bang his head on the wall, sweeping his arms as if against the hull of a ship. As if we were birds or animals closed up in the ark and it would be better to drown. Horse. Pelican. Hippopotamos. Giraffe. Milk-cow. Still they yelled and Gus swept his wings across the wallpaper until pictures and curtains fell.
Nealy came upstairs and knelt by the bed. I opened the sheet for her and we clung together under the cover sucking one another's hair until we could hear the silence of the flood.
I put my hands over my ears. "Pray for my headache, Nealy." I said.
She took a piece of my hair in her mouth. "You let your anger get away with you," Nealy answered. "Do you want an aspirin?" She asked as the chatham print of Aunt Mary's wallpaper darted above me.
"No, I just got sick."
Nealy prayed for my headache, and then for the family.
"He's our ship," she said. "Our mast and southerly wind. He leads us through the waters. He dries the land. He opens the mouth of headaches and gives them new tongues. Blessed be the Holy Gospel of our Lord Savior Jesus Christ Amen."
"Why do you keep praying?" I asked.
"Samuel prayed for Israel twenty years," Nealy said as she stroked my head. "He couldn't bring the ark of the covenant to Shiloh because of the people's distance from God. You've heard Pastor Hill's sermons, haven't you?"
"Don't bother me with that, Nealy."
I turned my face to the door that opened into Aunt Mary's fortress room. From the north trials and sorrows come. I felt the pillow wet from my tears as Nealy prayed and hummed.
I thought of the church supper, the foot races, and Pastor Hill's liberty sermon at the church.
I remembered the time I came back to Hammergies with Nealy when mother was sick. I thought about the setting sun, and how the bulky shadow of the car jumped from windbreak to field and back again with the dip and rise of the telephone wire between the poles. I felt the white frame Victorian house over me again that belonged to the Corders for three generations.
"I'm tired, Nealy," I said as I listened to the pulsing silence that followed the angry voices downstairs. I thought about the cottonwood and hackberry burning in the windbreaks—I thought about Samuel praying twenty years—I thought about Nealy's flute and the Old Hundred Psalm at Hammergies Church.
Heat invaded the room and the noise of the Lord. In the red haze of the setting sun, the beseiged town would rise in smoke. I felt its dark tides.
"But a highway will be there," Nealy said, "and a way."
A Long Trail
In the yard, Gus scraped his skin with the shaft-point of a feather.
"Don't do that, Gus," Nealy said. But he was becoming a blood brother to the birds.
Shame
Nealy and I stood on a corner of Hammergies by the feedstore where a group of kids laughed and talked. There was a cigarette still burning at the curb. Gus dared me to smoke it. I picked it up, looked at it a moment, "You do it, Nealy," I said.
She put it to her mouth, then threw it down. "It smells nasty," she said.
The kids laughed. Nealy stood unflinching before them, but Gus and I were cowards, shifting our feet uncomfortably as they laughed at our squeamishness.
"Aunt Mary will be waiting," I said, "with the receiving antenna on her head. Her telescope on the roof." I spoke with the bitter taste of pencils, the Ticonderogas dad used at the Chronicle. "Let's go."
"I'll take you," Jason said.
* * *
Aunt Mary had a frequency she kept tuned to us. She listened for radio signals from the angels. Sometimes in church she heard words from far away. I imagined Aunt Mary with her whip out there trying to rearrange the stars into Christian formations: Jonah's whale. Job's behemoth. Old Testament sheep. Goats. Rams. "How could we believe with heathen signs over us?" She asked. "Wasn't human nature enough to keep us off track? We had to have it overhead at night—?"
We rode with Jason, C.C., Horace and Clinter Krudup—Nealy, Gus and I. Horace with eyes close together as the headlights on Farley's jeep. Mother and Aunt Mary stowed away in Aunt Mary's house.
"We come shamed from Kansas City," mother tearfully told old friends who gathered at our return. Dad and Farley were the cause; "but she'd been warned," Aunt Mary consoled.
Jason's truck tore up the roads. I could hardly see for all the flying hair. Nealy screamed. Rain and clouds. Snowgeese flying south then north again, the strain of axle and wheel, of mother and father, their call, Farley's dulcimer and saw, backroads, drybarns and country.
"Jason, slow down—" Nealy beat on the back-window.
C.C., Nealy and I were in the truckbed, the four boys were in the truck, whooping over bumps while we yelled in the cloud of dust a buffalo herd could have stirred.
Nealy prayed for us. I cried. C.C. laughed, never did have sense to cry. But I felt the dustclouds and grit down my throat, the flying gravel and choking coughs. We screamed at Gus for mercy. "Mother is upset enough with dad and Farley. If we had a wreck she'd never recover, Gus." Soberness overcame the speed of our trip. Jason slowed his truck—mud-flaps, coontail and radio gear. He had finished high school, like Gus. Nealy and I would return to Kansas City in the fall, if mother went back. Even if she didn't, Nealy and I could keep house for dad, Farley and Gus. My brother would be starting to the University of Kansas City, and driving the bookmobile for the city library.
Jason cut across a field to another road that went back toward Hammergies. We stopped at Flat Creek, and went wading, where we saw the car of Thomas Grostephan, whom Aunt Mary liked. He was with another girl that day. Jason and C.C. walked away with them for a while.
"Tell us about your pa," Horace said as we sat on the bank of the meandering creek. "Ma's dying to know why Mrs. Williges was crying in church again Sunday."
"It was shame, Krudup," Nealy said. "Shame. If Farley doesn't keep her weeping, dad does, and the paper and those damned calls." I so rarely heard Nealy curse I looked at her startled a moment.
"Tell us, tell us."
"It would seem dull to you, Clinter." Nealy said.
"Try and make it good."
Simon Peter said unto them,
I go fishing.
They said unto him,
we also go with you—
John 21:3
Dad kept a dinghy in the backyard of our house in Kansas City. It was Uncle Farley's boat, but Farley lived in an apartment and the only place he had was for his jeep. Besides, dad used it as much as Farley. They fished Mussel Fork and Flat Creek while mother had the barbed irons and fish spears of her prayer meeting at our church in Kansas City praying for their souls. "For, lo the day shall come when he will take you away with hooks. Amos 4:2." Mother read.
Nonetheless, Bill and Farley Williges traveled the lowland swamps, fished in the early morning fog knowing the women in Kansas City were on their knees. They would have divided Farley like quilt pieces.
"I'm going to be a fisherman also," Nealy would say from the backseat on our way to church and I giggled. Mother scowled from the frontseat. Gus also.
I wondered how it was when dad met her in Hammergies. I thought of her as a young girl, hiding in the mock-orange bush in the Corder yard that shed its white flowers in summer. Bill had been too long with Farley. He'd never been straightened. Besides, she smelled like the mock-orange bush and they were married. How long, I wondered, till she lost him—
"It was Farley that come between us," mother said tearfully. She couldn't abide Farley in her house, though he was there often for meals and during sessions about the paper. He smelled like stale pipe tobacco, was unkempt; had holes in his socks, which Nealy darned; was untamed.
The women prayed and Farley would come to church with us; then, as though remembering the fish he ate in Egypt, the cucumbers and leeks, he was off again to Mussel Fork. And dad went with him. There was a bond between the brothers that mother couldn't sever.
It seemed to me also that Farley was always at our house, or they were always gone for the newspaper. Stories happened anytime. Sometimes the paper ran a section of Farley's photographs. He had been to the Pottawatomie Indian Reservation in Kansas where he took the stark land. He brought back a black, white and red striped Indian blanket which he gave to Aunt Mary in Hammergies.
"Heathen," she said, and threw it on the floor.
"I think July Fourth is Independence from the Indians," Gus told us. "We claimed their land more than we did the British."
"The Indian gave himself for us." Farley added.
I listened to them argue and thought of Jesus as far away as the Indians.
Mother preached at dad and Farley. When she threatened them, I left the room. I knew there would be other loud quarrels. Often, I knew, she didn't feel well.
Then there was the dinghy in the backyard that caught the flowers from her mock-orange bush while she hung clothes.
Yet it was Farley and dad that I liked. Farley had a Hudson we rode in for years. It looked like an army-tank by the curb. The Hudson could go anywhere until it met a lowland marsh on their way fishing where it remains. Afterward, Farley got a jeep.
(Continues...)