In the morning I learned about churning. One sat on the back porch in a rocking chair and pushed the churn, a barrel on rockers, with one’s foot. One looked at the currant bushes or the maples on the hill or provided oneself with a book. A basket and half-finished gray vest showed that Aunt Sarah knitted as she sat here. There would be time to complete any number of vests.
Maybe I should learn to knit. I needed something to keep me from thinking, but whenever I tried to read, the people, even my favorite characters in my favorite books, seemed like paper dolls. Nothing was powerful enough to turn my mind from Mother.
Away on the hillside I heard the mowing machine clatter. Aunt Sarah stepped around the kitchen; bowls clinked; the oven door slammed. Then she came out to the back porch, tying on her straw hat. “Call me when it comes together. I’ll be in the garden.”
I waited long enough for her to get there. Then I dashed upstairs, pulled the bureau six inches out from the wall, and peeked around the edge of the open door.
The room beyond was empty. Absolutely empty.
A closet door stood open, and the closet was empty, too, except for the bed slats leaning in one corner. No curtains, no rugs, no cobwebs, hardly any dust. Across the room was another closed door.
I stared at the wide boards crossed by sunlight, at the creamy, violet-sprigged wallpaper. I had thought these rooms would be full of furniture. Why else would the front room be given up to storage except that the upstairs rooms were full?
This room was empty but not abandoned. It had been cleaned recently and smelled of vinegar and soda. What lay beyond the closed door, so flat and bland and white? I wanted to go open it, but it seemed a long way across the room, and Aunt Sarah might come back to the house. I didn’t want her to find the churn deserted. I closed the door behind the bureau but left the bureau where it was, pulled away from the wall just far enough that I could slip behind it.
Back downstairs I rocked, and rocked, and thought of Mother, and cried. Still the butter wasn’t done. I rocked some more, rocked with all my might and determination, until at last the yellow grains of butter floated in the milk and it was time to call Aunt Sarah.
Even as Uncle Clayton drove back from mowing, clouds began to gather, and by late afternoon it was raining. Aunt Sarah looked dark, but Uncle Clayton seemed perfectly placid.
“First cut of hay always gets rained on,” he said. “I cut that weedy spot a-purpose.”
“Seems to me after forty years a man could cut hay without it getting rained on!”
Behind his magazine Uncle Clayton murmured, “You should have stopped me, dear.” Then he glanced at me and looked startled. He wasn’t used to having his little flings of spirit witnessed.
When the long, wet day ended and we went to bed, it was actually dark. I waited, while the rain roared off the eaves, until Aunt Sarah would surely be asleep. Then I slid behind the bureau, sheltering the candle flame with my palm, and opened the door.
Darkness doesn’t scare me, but this empty room seemed too large. Shadows lay thick in the corners. There was nothing to see here. I went straight across and opened the door on the other side.
I was looking out into a hallway. Another closed door stood opposite. I moved toward it and stopped with a gasp, sensing a black chasm to my right. I turned the candle so I could see.
Stairs. Just stairs.
I opened the next door: another room, also clean, also empty. It contained two closets, one piled with wool blankets, the other bare.
The hallway made a three-sided rectangle around the stairwell. At the other end was a third door. I already knew what I would find there, an empty room.
Why would anyone do that? Why take every stick of furniture out of these unused rooms and pile it in the front parlor? That room must have been very pleasant once, with the sunny windows and the fireplace.
Of course the fewer rooms you used in a house, the less work, but then, why was it so clean up here?
The rain continued the next day, steady and gentle. I didn’t churn. Churning was every third day, depending on the milk supply. Instead I swept and dusted and washed the kitchen down with vinegar. After dinner I walked over to Truman’s.
My oilskin could have been longer. It kept the upper reaches dry, but water rolled down and collected in the hem of my skirt, which also gathered moisture from the grass in the lane. The fabric slapped chill against my legs.
In Truman’s yard the violets bloomed, each flower beaded with raindrops. As I walked past the sagging shed and the scent of crushed gillflower rose, the feeling of belonging came over me again. It was like the line that used to run between Mother and me, diffuse now, as if the love had become a cloud I walked into. Only here. Was she here? I paused and looked around. There was nothing to see but the violets and the trees, nothing to hear but the rain, nothing to feel but cold and wet, but—but something. Something was here that belonged to me.
I knocked. Tippy barked sharply, and after a moment the door opened. “Why, Harry!” Truman slipped his suspenders up over a sleeveless undershirt. The stump of his arm was in full view. I couldn’t help staring. It looked so neat, sliced off square like a piece of meat at the butcher’s. Shiny-looking skin stretched across the end.
“C’mon in!” He reached for his threadbare jacket, thrown across the back of the chair. When he’d shrugged into it, he looked ordinary again, as ordinary as a man could look with a flowing yellow beard and only one arm.
“Pull a chair up to the stove and get dry,” he said. “I’ll make tea.”
I took off my oilskin and sat down, spreading my skirt and looking around the room. At first glance it seemed unbelievably cluttered. There was a cot in one corner and a woodbox in another, a table, two chairs, pots and pans, a sack of onions, a coat on the floor covered with dog hair. There were books on every surface and books through the open door in the next room.
But despite the clutter, the room was really simple. I never saw Truman look for anything. His hand just reached, and what he needed was right there. The canister. The teapot. The potholder—
Mother, I thought suddenly. It was as if I’d caught sight of … not her but something that belonged to her. What was it? Not the pans. Not—
“The curtains!”
“What about ’em?” A cloud of steam masked Truman’s face as he poured hot water into the teapot.
“Those were here!” I said. “Weren’t they? Didn’t Mother make those?” They were white, with a strip of bright calico sewn across the bottom. Wasn’t there a dress of that fabric?
“Yup, those were hers.” Truman looked around. “Not much else. The cookstove. We figured it didn’t make sense, her haulin’ this stove downhill and me buyin’ one and haulin’ it up. So we come to terms.”
That was after my father died, when Mother must have felt just the way I did now. How did she bear it? I wondered. I never knew how much grief hurt, so I never knew to ask her.
“How—how was she? After he died?”
Truman considered me, his fingers twisting a small section of beard into a spike. “I don’t s’pose she put you down for three days,” he said at last. “And you were a pretty hefty package about then, big two-year-old girl. But she held on to you, and that kept back the worst of it, I guess.”
I knew what the worst of it felt like. It hurt, really hurt, in your body. Would it help having someone to hold?
Truman poured tea into the two tin cups. I wrapped my hands around mine and put it down in a hurry. Hot!
“So, Harry,” Truman said, “come to visit your bird?”
I’d actually forgotten my gray rooster, dearest thing in life to me when I was carrying him down the road. “No, I’m here to tell you that haying’s started.” That was the errand I’d been charged with when I’d said where I was going.
Truman looked out at the dripping eaves. “Clayton’s cut the weed field. What’d Sarah say?”
“‘After forty years I’d think a man could cut hay without it getting rained on!’”
“You do it well,” Truman said gravely. He reached into the skillet beside him and started to break off a chunk of biscuit. Then he paused. “By golly, if Sarah was here, she’d give me a piece of her mind! Excuse me.”
“I was wondering how you cut bread.”
“Same way I do a lot of things. I don’t.” He finished breaking the biscuit and handed it to me. “I generally dump the jam on a plate and dip into it. That suit you?”
“Why don’t I spread it for us?” I said, spotting a knife on the table. Everything was clean. How did he wash his dishes? I wondered.
He settled back in his chair, stretching his long legs, and watched me spread the jam. “You’re like your mother,” he said after a minute.
“I am? How?”
He shrugged. “Manners, I guess. Kind manners.”
“Am I like my father, too?”
“Oh, you’re a Gibson, all right! You’ve got the chin!”
I put my hand up to hide it. “You mean, like Aunt Sarah?”
He smiled, the slow narrowing and arching of his eyes that reminded me of the years he’d spent outdoors, marching and fighting. “Just like,” he said. “You look just like she did at the same age.”
“You knew her then?”
“Oh, yes! Known Sarah since before she was born. The Gibsons—the old folks—wa’n’t too very much older than me.” He took a cautious sip of tea, eyes focused on something far away. “The old folks! Seems funny to call ’em that. They never did get old.”
“My grandparents?” He nodded. “What happened to them?”
“What happened?” He looked down, and the bushy shelves of his brows hid his eyes from me. “They died, Harry. Awful lot of consumption on this hill, back when it was full of farms. I guess maybe that’s died, too. Hope it has.”
I tried to remember the dates on the gravestones, to make a story out of what he was telling me, but the numbers wouldn’t come back. “How old were the children—I mean, my aunts and uncles? When their parents died?”
“Sarah, she was about fourteen when she was left to mother the rest of ’em. Your father was a baby.”
My age almost. Only one year older. That girl who became Aunt Sarah must have felt the same way I did, the same way Mother did when my father died. She must have held on to baby Walter the way Mother held on to me, the way I would hold on to somebody, if there were anyone to hold.
Then why wasn’t she nicer? Why didn’t she show a little kindness?
Truman sighed aloud, like a word, and rubbed his big hand down his face. “We was proud of her. She raised all four of ’em, even after she buried her dad. I remember when that house was full of young folks. They’d have dancin’ in the kitchen most Saturday nights.… I was quite a bit older, but that didn’t stop me courtin’. But Sarah had those kids to raise, and Clayt had two arms.”
He’d wanted to marry Aunt Sarah?
He sat with his chin on his chest for a minute and then took a big swig of tea. That was how the beard got stained, I noticed. “And then they started dyin’,” he said. “Get into their twenties, they’d get that cough. Sarah fought it, every time. She was bound and determined, but you can’t beat it. Hard times. Hard times. I don’t know how she stood it. This arm of mine is kid stuff compared to that.”
The empty rooms were their rooms. Of course. “What about my father?”
“He was sick already when he met your mother, though Sarah wouldn’t see it. He knew what he had coming to him, and he told your mother, but he couldn’t scare her off.” Truman gazed past the stove. After a while his chest heaved, as if to push off sorrow. “All over now. They’re together.”
And I’m alone.
Truman said, “But you’ve heard this all a hundred times.”
I’d never heard it once. Oh, I knew Aunt Sarah had raised Father, and I knew what he’d died of. But Mother didn’t tell her life as a story. I knew the events, but not the details, not the flow of one thing into another. The fever epidemic, the orphanage, school and love and widowhood—I knew they’d all happened, but Mother didn’t look back, so I didn’t either. I felt ashamed of my ignorance.
We sat silent. Outside, the drips slowed, and a breeze stirred the wet leaves. Of course Aunt Sarah hated Mother, I thought. She took away baby Walter. Mother might have shared, but Aunt Sarah never would have. It was all or nothing with her.
“So why is the house like that?” I asked. “Why are those rooms empty, and why is everything crowded into the front parlor?”
“Had some good times in that parlor,” Truman said musingly. “But y’see, Harry, Sarah had to go on living there after all that happened. She had to manage some way.” He glanced down at himself. “It’s like this arm. Wa’n’t hurt all that bad, but if they hadn’t cut it off, ’twould have gone black, and the black would have spread into me, and I wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh.” I was trying to see how Truman’s arm and the house at Vinegar Hill went together. Cleaning out those rooms, where maybe they’d died, filling with furniture the room where they’d had good times together—was that like cutting off an arm with gangrene? What if I’d had to live in the house where Mother and I lived and where she died? What would I have done with her bed-room? Maybe rearranging the house was the closest Aunt Sarah could come to moving.
Truman gazed at the front of the stove as if it were a window. “Nothin’s come out the way we thought it would. Here we thought that farm wouldn’t be big enough to support ’em all, and maybe one of ’em’d want this place, and who else could they buy a little land from … and now the ridge is empty, and Clayt cuttin’ back a little every year. He ain’t a spring chicken, Clayt, for all he was the baby of the family.”
“That’s why Aunt Sarah hated Mother,” I said. “She took my father away from the farm.”
Truman shook his head, not disagreeing, just shaking his head at life. “That’s about a tenth of it, Harry. Your mother was—well, you know what she was, and Sarah—Sarah ought to have had more scope. Ought to have gone to the Academy, and I s’pose Dave would have sent her if Melinda’d lived. She has great abilities, Sarah does, and we’ve all benefited from ’em, but it’s been a narrow life, no denying that.”
“I… see.”
“Well, you don’t see, Harry, but in time you will. You make sure you get your schoolin’. Sarah doesn’t know what she missed—well, she does and she doesn’t. But she played the hand she was dealt, like you’re doin’ now.”
The hand I played was the Academy, the colt, my strength, and my sorrow: Mother’s love within me. All this new knowledge was like another card I’d drawn from the deck. It changed everything, but for the moment I couldn’t see how. “I should go,” I said after a few minutes.
“Tell Clayton I’ll be over.”
The rain had given way to heavy mist. I walked slowly along the road, listening to drips and loud birdsong. Bright pink worms stretched and contracted themselves between the ruts. I saw a robin snatch one and fly away.
So Aunt Sarah was an orphan. Like Mother. Like Father. I come from a long line of orphans.
Everyone’s an orphan, if they live long enough. But not everyone is orphaned young.
But Mother was happy. I knew now that she was happy on purpose, with sorrow in the past and sorrow sure to come, in debt, with a bad heart. I made her happy. She always made sure I knew that.
Before me, Father. Before Father, her school, her friends.
What’s going to make you happy, Harry? I could be an orphan like Mother or an orphan like Aunt Sarah.
“But that’s not fair!” I said out loud. Aunt Sarah must have been splendid. She raised them all, and Truman wanted to marry her—and then they died.
Just for a moment I felt bitterly ashamed. All I had done was hate her. When I said, “You want me to die,” when she turned to me, blotched and still, she must have felt as if she’d been stabbed in the heart. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She did try to kill my rooster. She did say those terrible things.
Still, pain could twist people. I’d felt it inside myself, mean and sour. Mother must have known that about Aunt Sarah, but she also knew that Aunt Sarah had raised my father, made a good man of him. Sending me here, she sent me back to good as well as bad.
I reached the pasture gate and paused, looking across the hills. Somewhere down there West Barrett nestled among the trees, with the sawmill humming at its heart and no view at all. I would have missed this place. But in all those years, Mother came up again only as far as the blackberry pastures.
I heard a step and felt the colt’s warm breath on my cheek. “Hello, Kid.” I rubbed his hot, wet neck, and he pressed against my hand, tossing his head and grimacing.
Here was my baby. He’d been left to me as I’d been left to Mother, and baby Walter—my father—had been left to Aunt Sarah. I crawled between the bars, struggling against my wet skirt and oilskins, and put my arms around his neck.
He tried to rub his body along me. He must itch from the rain. “Hold still!” I moved along with him, hugging the muscular neck as it tossed, but then his shoulder pushed, my heel caught in a rut, and I sat down hard.
Legs; big, smooth joints; surprised, innocent face. Sweet breath clouded around me.
“Yeah, how did I get down here?” I clambered back; through the gate and leaned there, scraping mud off the back of my skirt with a flat stick. “No, I won’t scratch you anymore!”
The colt heaved a sigh, gazing across the hillside. Lid and lashes folded close over his eye, like calyx over bud. His breath and his warm, wet smell made an atmosphere around us. I breathed it, remembering his birth, remembering Belle’s deep, soft-voiced whinny to him, remembering Mother’s delight in the new little creature, and how everything about him had pointed us toward the future, when I was grown, when I was in school.
I hope I can train you, I thought. Everything had changed, but the future, the colt giving me independence, could still come true. If I could make it.
When I walked into the kitchen, Aunt Sarah said, “What did you do, sit down and make mud pies?”
“I—” I bit back a sharp answer. She brought the tin bathtub in from the back room and began to draw steaming water from the tank beside the stove.
“Get out of your wet things and into that tub. Your uncle’s gone to town with the butter, so have a good long soak and get warm all the way through.”
She turned back to her rolling pin. I peeled off my clothes, folded myself under the water, and gazed around the kitchen. Its very size made it ugly, and the snuff-colored wainscoting and the vinegar smell.
But scent it with mulling cider, fill it with young people, color Truman’s beard brown, straighten Uncle Clayton’s shoulders, and set them dancing …
“Who made the music?”
She turned her head. “What?”
“Tru—Uncle Truman said you had dances. Who made the music?”
She turned back to her piecrust. Squeak, squeak went the rolling pin. “I did.”
I stared. As if she could feel my eyes, she said, “I had my father’s fiddle. He taught me to play.”
“But then you could never dance!” Not that I could imagine her dancing, but Truman had been courting her, and Uncle Clayton, too. Did that happen while she had a fiddle tucked under her chin?
“I wasn’t much for dancing.”
No, I could see that. Aunt Sarah played the tune, and everyone else danced to it.