RO WENT TO Stringtown to talk to Aunt Betty. She brought gifts, a jar of fruit vinegar, and some crab-apple jelly. You don’t visit hereabouts without bringing something from your larder.
“Do you want me to get word to Johnse about the baby?” I asked. It was early of a morning, the whispery part where even the birds speak in hushed voices.
“No time,” she said.
“I’ll make time. He should know, Ro. Isn’t right his not knowing.” Was she going to keep it from him, then?
“He and his family are off timbering,” she said.
It was the old of the moon. A good time for timbering. A good time for cutting hay, too, which was where Pa and my brothers had gone at first light. They never cut on the new of the moon, because the sap was still in the hay and it’d take longer to dry.
My family planted and harvested by the signs. The rules for this are simple. You plant in the fruitful signs of Scorpio, Pisces, Taurus, or Cancer. You plow in Aries. You plant flowers in Libra when the moon is in the first quarter. It goes on like that and you dasn’t go against the rules or corn will have small ears, potatoes will get nubs, and if you kill a hog in the growing parts of the moon the meat gets all puffy. Lots of town people just hoot about this, but it works for us so we keep doing it.
I had to go to school, so I couldn’t go to Aunt Betty’s with Ro. All day I thought about her. About that little bitty baby growing inside of her and her having to find someplace to stay because Pa would go crazy if he found out about it. She knew that as well as I did. All that jabber about the baby bringing people together was so much sassafras.
I half wished Aunt Betty would say no, that Ro couldn’t live with her. She still had three young ’uns at home and it’d be a bad example for them having Ro around, her not being wed and all. Wouldn’t it? But I knew the answer to that one, too.
Aunt Betty was the kindest creature around these parts who ever drew breath. She was a true Christian, good to everybody. She never talked about sin or hellfire. She just went about in her sweet way, and her door was open to anyone who was in need. So I wasn’t surprised when Ro came home in two days laden with blackberry jelly, huckleberry puffs, fig pudding, and the news that she was moving in with Aunt Betty.
She told that at supper. Pa said nothing, because he never spoke to her. Ma just blinked. “Leaving us again, Ro? Now why?”
I waited for my sister to tell them about the baby. In the next moment, silent except for the clinking of forks, I saw Alifair watching her. Just like a fox. And it came to me. Alifair suspected about the baby. Oh, how she’d love to know. She couldn’t wait for Ro to do something more to fall farther from grace. She’d be the first one to hop up from the table and move Ro’s pebble on Ma’s rock to the side of the damned, after it had been moved back to the side of the saved, too.
“I just feel like a burden here,” Ro said.
“Kin are never a burden,” Ma reminded her.
“I know,” Ro said softly, “but things are disquieted since I’m home, and I have no right to disquiet this family.”
Everyone waited for Pa to say something then. But my sister might as well have been speaking in tongues for all the mind Pa paid to her. He wasn’t about to break his silence nohow. So Ro packed her things and left the next day for Aunt Betty’s in Stringtown. She took the Coffin quilt with her.
“You’re the only one who knows about the baby,” she told me before she left. “I expect you to keep my secret, long as it can be kept.”
I’d die first before I told. I’d let myself be hauled into the woods by Yeller Thing. Didn’t she know that?
Things quieted down somewhat after she took her leave. But I missed her sore bad. Does Ma suspect the real reason? I wondered. You had to get up awful early in the morning to fool her.
I decided to test her. “I’m so sad Ro had to leave us,” I said one day while helping out in the kitchen. “Aren’t you, Ma?”
We were alone. I’d never say such if Alifair was around. When I was alone with Ma she sometimes said things she wouldn’t say around the others. Now she said something I wish I hadn’t been privy to.
“You know what we believe, Fanny,” she said. “That God predestines all things, good and bad. That the bad is for God’s purpose. That it serves some good. All evil brings out the good in people.”
I reckon it was right about then that I stopped being a Primitive Baptist, if I ever was one. I didn’t see what good could come out of Pa’s not talking to my sister, of Ro’s having a baby and the father not knowing it, of her having to live with Aunt Betty because she knew her family wouldn’t have her under their roof if they knew of it.
I never spoke to Ma about it again. We did our chores, went to school, to church. The colors in the woods deepened. The nights grew cold. Frost covered everything in the mornings. In church one Sunday the preacher said the end was at hand. “We’re in the last evening of time,” he said. “As far as when the end comes, Scripture tells us ‘even the angels in heaven won’t know.’ But I do believe we’re in the evening of time, and we’d all best prepare for it.”
They don’t fool around in our church. They get right to things. But at least we’re not as bad as the people who handle snakes to prove that God is looking out for them. I like to think that we don’t need to handle snakes to prove God loves us. Or stand around getting the jimjams about being consumed in fire. I like to think about God as somebody kind and loving. Somebody who’d like my sister Ro’s baby right off. Maybe give it dimples, even though she wasn’t married to Johnse Hatfield when she was having it.
Anyways, things seemed to settle down after Ro left. Or so I thought. But I soon found different, I soon found that once evil gets into your house, it slithers around there like a cold mist. Sometimes even hides in the corners. But it’s there once you let it in and you can’t get shut of it.
How did it get in? With that Coffin quilt of Ro’s. That quilt smelled of evil. And I think Mrs. Hatfield gave it to Ro so the evil could touch her. And us.
Anyways, evil doesn’t he still too long. Any more than a Hoop snake. After a week or two things started happening. Real fast, too.
It started the day I rode over to Aunt Betty’s to see Ro. That was the day I found out she’d put her own name on one of the little coffins on the edge of the Coffin quilt. And if that wasn’t enough, it was the day Johnse came to visit.