ROSEANNA AND I had little iron bedsteads in our room in the house on Blackberry Fork. They were covered with quilts Mama made. And we had calico curtains on the windows, too. It was a real nice room. Roseanna made it nice. She had a looking glass over a little wooden dressing table that brother Floyd made for her. “Like grand ladies do,” she told me. I don’t know how Ro knew what grand ladies did, but I took her word for it She let me use the little dressing table and taught me how to curl up my hair in rags. And she let me touch all her things, like the brooch Pa gave her when she turned twenty-one that belonged to his very own mama. Even the combs she put in her hair, her good embroidered handkerchiefs, and her scented soap. She made that soap herself. When we cooked up a batch, she took some aside and put some decoction in it that made it smell good. Adelaide called it her witch’s brew. I knew for a fact that the scent came from some little heart-shaped leaves in the woods. But I didn’t tell anybody. I know how to keep a secret.
Roseanna could always make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, that’s what Mama said. I thought Roseanna could do miracles. I depended on her for it.
Adelaide, Alifair, and Trinvilla shared a bigger room, but they could have it. I was never allowed in there. They had their secret things. Alifair made corncob dolls that were precious to her. And Trinvilla had her box of dye recipes. I didn’t care about any of it, not even Adelaide’s herbs. She was only ten to my seven when the trouble with Roseanna started but already coming on to be a little old granny woman. Mama let her visit with Aunt Cory, a real granny woman, and stay for days. I think Adelaide did it just to get out of chores.
Adelaide and Trinvilla were jealous of Ro because she was so purty and all the boys in Pike County wanted to court her. And they were hateful to me because I was Ro’s pet. They were all the time whispering how she was going to come to perdition. But Adelaide and Trinvilla didn’t even know what perdition was. And didn’t care. If Alifair said Ro was going to come to it, they agreed. They’d agree with anything she said. I think they had a quarter of a brain between them.
Truth to tell, I didn’t know the meaning of the word, either. But I learned it on Election Day, 1880. The day Ro ran off.
THE NIGHT BEFORE Election Day was the first time I saw Yeller Thing. I was out back by the corncrib, stuffing straw in mattress tickings. The mattresses had to be filled with clean straw every fall. Adelaide was supposed to be helping me, but she’d wandered off to get some ginseng down in the holler by the briar thickets. So I wandered off, too, across the creek to the woods to check on my playhouse and get my dolly that Floyd had carved me.
The sun was all but down and the woods were filled with shadows and the sounds birds make when they’re going to sleep. I fetched my doll, climbed down the ladder, and then I heard the noise, the rustling nearby. At first I thought it was Adelaide, come to spy on me, because I never allowed her in my playhouse. But nobody was there. Again the rustling, this time closer, and I got scairt. Just off a piece, across the holler, I could see our house, all solid and snuggly, with smoke coming out of the chimney. How could anything hurt me so close to our house?
But I knew better. Hadn’t Calvin warned me about snakes, and even bears? I searched the ground around me, peered into the blue shadows. The sun was gone, it was coming on to night. The woods were no place for a little girl at night. I turned to go, then heard it again, the rustling.
Before I turned I smelled it. And almost laughed. A skunk! I turned to see where it was and that is when I saw Yeller Thing for the first time.
It whooshed past me. I almost felt the draft it made. And the smell got worse than anything, even worse than the outhouse at school in September.
I know what I saw. It was yeller. And big. Bigger than anything in these woods had a right to be, even a bear. It streaked by like a painter cat. And there was this eerie sound. Not a growl. It sounded like a Rebel yell, from what my pa told me about such yells. Or like a man about to die, which is maybe the same thing.
For a moment I stood stock-still. And then I heard the words Mama so often read from her Bible: “And it is appointed unto men once to die.”
Those words just came into my head. And I knew then that what was out there was nothing animal or human. The knowing flooded through me, and I ran. Back through the holler, across the creek, and up to our house, through the back door, yelling, “Mama, Mama, I saw the Devil!”
Mama calmed me. She gave me cookies and warm milk. And she scolded, too.
“If you’d paid mind to your chores and finished filling that mattress ticking, you wouldn’t be in trouble. Where’s Adelaide?”
I sipped my warm milk, still shivering. “Out picking ginseng.”
I saw Mama look across the kitchen at Floyd, who was sipping some coffee at the table. My brother Floyd is old. Twenty-eight at least. He has his own little log cabin a piece away from us, on the creek, where he makes his moonshine and his toys. He travels around selling those toys every fall and sells the moonshine all the year round. He is not so all-fired-up taken with Pa as the others are. Floyd is different. Alifair said he has girls wherever he goes selling his toys. But he never speaks about them. Every once in a while he comes to sup with us.
“Go find Adelaide,” Mama said to Floyd.
Floyd got right to his feet. “Where’s she picking?” he asked me. He had Pa’s long gun in his hand.
“Down in the holler by the briar thickets.”
He made for the door.
“He won’t be after Adelaide,” I told him. “He’s come for me.”
Floyd looked at me with those steel gray eyes of his. He’s a quiet sort, but nice. Lots of times I go to visit him at his cabin and bring him some hot biscuits or fresh preserved jam. He lets me touch the toys he’s making, the jumping jack, the little farm sled. He asks my opinion about girls’ toys. And listens to what I tell him.
“Why’s he come for you?” he asked. And I knew he believed me.
“He’s come to tell me something. To warn me.” The words were out of my mouth before I knew it. But they were right sounding. “But I don’t know about what.”
Floyd nodded. He understood. When people hereabouts tell stories of haints, others don’t disbelieve. Some tell of seeing ghosts of tormented souls. Some of witches come to make your soul tormented.
“Best put a drop of turpentine and some sugar in that milk of hers,” he told Mama. Then he went out the door.
I know what that’s for, a fretful little ’un. It’ll make them sleep. Oh, how I hate being the youngest! Mama did as Floyd said, then made me wash and go right to bed.