Chapter 30
Lily could not recall the day of the week when it happened. She did remember that the year was 1961 when it happened in June, Granny’s Month of the Green Corn Moon. She did remember the sound of heavy crockery breaking behind her. She turned to find Anna on the floor, a crockery bowl shattered. Raw eggs seeped across boards and dripped through cracks. Anna shuttered. And shuttered again. Lily grabbed her mama and sat her up. A milky substance thrust itself out of Anna’s mouth, and Anna closed her eyes.
Lily shook Anna until she opened her eyes. She dragged her to the bed, all the time talking, talking, trying to call her mama back. When Anna didn’t speak, Lily ran, without thinking, for Kee Granny.
Kee Granny brought her supplies. She carried the satchel she had brought from the Carolina Mountains. She pulled back Anna’s eyelids and put her ear to Anna’s chest, but she did not concoct a brew. “Leave her lie. Let her know you’re here.” She closed her black valise, now so worn it was grey in spots. “She seen the other side and she wants to go.”
Lily choked. “I don’t understand. Why?”
“Your mama knows, but she ain’t saying. Our job’s to make her path easy. That’s all.”
Lily rushed for the porch and stared toward the chimney. “Did you see her spirit mist?” she called through the open door. “Did you? If her spirit mist is not there, you can fix her.” Lily shut the door. “You’re Beloved Mother. You know things.” She grabbed Kee Granny by the shoulders and shook her until Kee Granny’s head bobbed back and forth. Lily stopped when she saw the granny’s face. Weariness? Shame? Lily could not decide. Tears ran down the scars and disappeared into Kee Granny’s open mouth.
“Kee Granny? Tell me.” The granny’s face seemed cut into two parts. Lily was not sure now an answer was worth this. She brought the granny to her shoulder and held her.
“I ain’t no Beloved Mother. And I shore ain’t the Beloved Mother,” Kee Granny spoke tentatively into Lily’s ear.
“But you’re Cherokee,” Lily rationalized.
“Maybe a part of me’s been Cherokee once. But nobody never made me no Beloved Mother.”
“But you’ve said so all these years. . . and you made Mama brews and potions and rattled the gourd and danced the rabbit dance.” Lily’s voice fell as she spoke. “Great Spirit talks to you.”
“I never said Great…” Her voice broke.
Lily interrupted her. “You taught me…” She could not have said if the tears she felt were hers or Kee Granny’s, so close to each other they stood. Lily pushed Kee Granny back so she could see her face.
Kee Granny kept her eyes to the floor. “They’s those who knows more than most. They’s the ones who decide.”
“Did they make the scars?”
“Scars? These?” She ran her hand down her cheek. “Oh, no. No, Lily. No more than your own arm scar. A white man done this. No. My Cherokee man was a good man.” Granny Slocomb plopped heavy onto the floor.
Lily glared at nothing. Numbness draped itself over her like a thunder-filled cloud and her knees weakened. She dropped to the floor beside Kee Granny. Outside a woodpecker looking for grubs thumped his hard head against a hollow tree. “And the cedar? The one for Great Spirit?”
Granny answered with a slight shake of her head. “You can’t not believe, Lily. Not Great Spirit. He exists in every living thing.”
“Lies?” she whispered. “It’s all been lies?”
“What’s true depends on who’s saying it, I reckon.” Granny’s voice drained quieter with each word. “Believe anything strong enough and long enough, it becomes true.”
Lily’s spirit shattered into little bits of nothing. “Why?” Lily wanted a truth to be a firm truth, not something defined by the believer.
“Sometimes it takes a life to give a life.” Granny held up a hand as if asking Lily to help her rise.
Lily rose instead. “Who told you that?” She leaned over the mound on the floor. “You taught me all things are one. It’s Beloved Mother’s job to preserve.”
Kee Granny lifted herself up on her knees in an attempt to face Lily. “A body believes what it will. What it wants to.”
“What were you giving her?” Lily backed away. “My mama?”
The granny rose, her eyes now coal black. “Belladonna.” She shuffled toward the door.
Lily knew there was more. “And foxglove,” Lily demanded. “Did you give her foxglove?”
“A mite.” Kee Granny gripped the doorknob.
“Foxglove. My God. You’ve been killing my mama with foxglove.” Lily dropped into a chair. “You slowed her heart so she can’t live. Why?”
Kee Granny stepped out on the porch, leaving the door ajar.
“Get off my porch!” Lily screamed. The veins in her neck throbbed. “Go back to your Great Spirit and his rattling ways.”
Throughout the night, the recollection of Kee Granny’s moaning as she stepped off the porch and crept away from Boone Station would awaken Lily again and again.
The next day, exhausted, Lily stoked dying logs. The fire sparked and hissed against Lily’s probing. She placed another log on the irons. It popped and blazed into a stronger flame.
Lily crossed the room and laid her hand on Anna’s forehead. Her mama’s skin felt like the dry paper Lily had used to tender the fire. She lifted the woolen quilt and placed her mama’s arms under it.
From the porch she brought a pitcher of Gertie’s milk to the table. She cracked a freshly laid egg into a jar, poured in milk and added sugar for temptation. She stirred the drink, clinking the fork against the jar sides, to see if her mama would respond. Anna did not.
Lily lifted her mama’s head, enticing her to drink. Anna’s lips had frozen into a thin straight line. What Lily offered her spilled down a crease that ran from her lip and dripped off her chin. For a moment, Kee Granny’s tear-filled scars flashed before Lily. She rubbed the scar on her own arm still knotted and black from soot the granny had used to slow the blood when Lily had cut herself and new to Boone Station. It was so familiar she rarely noticed it, but it marked her arm as surely as would have a brand of ownership signified by the granny. Lily went to the washbasin, took a towel and wiped her mama’s face.
A storm cloud passed over the house. Light in Boone Station faded at once. Lily lit the kerosene lamps, one by the bed and one on the table, to take away the dark. Lamps cast softer light than Powell Valley electricity. Lily needed softness, not harsh reality. Later she would take a dried rabbit from the clothesline between the side posts on the front porch and boil it into broth. Tomorrow. She would try again to rouse her mama tomorrow.
Perhaps it was grief. Perhaps it was guilt for the part she had played in taking her mama down this path by letting the granny treat her. Whatever it was, it came upon Lily and sent her into rages. When a rage overcame her, Lily took care not to touch Anna. Over the next weeks, her anger would explode and she would slam her fist on the table. Lily’s hands ached from clutching whatever she came near. Her aggression left bruises that enlarged with each strike. To settle herself, she would bite her lips and swallow the sweet blood. As time passed, each calming time grew shorter than the one before.
Memory came to Lily in a flash. She opened the top bureau drawer and removed the box of carved animals she had collected from her time on Turtleback Mountain. She had been a younger Lily, a Lily who had trusted Kee Granny, a Lily who had believed that the Little People, the Laurel People, and the Dogwood People would come to make her happy. She had left them hidden, for as her mama had said about the little treasures that first day coming up the Turtleback, somebody might come and claim them as their own. Now she needed to have each carving before her, in sight so she could relive each one and its place in her past.
“Good that she respects her past,” says Great Spirit to the dark universe. “She’ll be less likely to make the same mistakes again.”
“Should I tell her about her father?” asks Sister Sun.
Great Spirit curls his upper lip and turns his back. “Don’t take the problems of the innocent and increase them, Sister Sun. Don’t put misfortune on the blameless.”
Lily took the carvings, a thin strip of leather, a large needle and began to string. First a turtle, for Turtleback Mountain itself. Then a fox, a fox she had once found on the trail to the revered cedar. Next a cougar, larger than the rest. And the fat, round bear that had dropped into her lap the day she and her mother rested by the roadside. She rubbed the bear with special tenderness against her cheek. She had not worn it since she boarded the school truck for Covington. She had not realized that she missed it so. There were several turkeys. These she threaded in among other animals. And a little nesting bird her mother had refused to explain.
She saved the beautiful, full-antlered stag for last. Taking it from where Anna had it on the mantle, she slipped the leather through its hole and tied a secure knot, adding a loop so that the menagerie could be hung from her porch. The superb stag would lead the procession, a total, she counted, of seventeen animals, all in a row. Great Spirit had sent one for each year of her life.
Before hanging the animals, she caressed each with her fingers. They felt old, old enough to remember the Creation. She memorized each cut, each detail, so completely that she would later be able to re-create each in her mind. She hung the carvings in a swag from the porch rafter where Owl still came to roost. Their presence helped alleviate her solitude.
Lily had watched Anna try all summer to die. At the end of summer, once her mama could no longer lift her arms or speak, Lily knew it was time to ask Gabe to go to Covington to buy a new, long-handled shovel for the burying.
Sister Sun tries not to scorch the mountain. Brother Moon cools each night. They call to night breezes to give Lily restful sleep. They must make this trying time easier for Lily, this young woman they have come to think of as their own.
“Losing her father and now losing her mother after casting Kee Granny out,” says Brother Moon.” Me and you and Gabe Shipley are all she has left.”
“Does she know?” says Sister Sun.” About us, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” says Brother Moon. “Maybe one day when the universe is in syzygy Great Spirit will speak.”
Lily planned for the laying by. It came to her in the night on the floor while she lay wrapped against the damp in the extra bed quilt. The event would be a non-event with only Anna and Lily. Maybe Gabe. If the weather allowed. It had been only Anna and Lily and Gabe these past months now that Kee Granny did not come. It would be right that they did this alone.
Anna favored a woolen crazy quilt for its pieces and the precise chicken scratch stitching in bright blue thread, much like the one at Granny’s church. Lily would clean her mama’s waist-length hair with cornmeal. She would brush it afresh, plait it, and wrap it around her mama’s head like a tarnished silver tiara. Forty years old, she was. Too young for grey hair. And a cotton dress. No shoes. Just the quilt and her mama. And socks. To warm her mama’s feet.
No. She would write words of honor and place them in the coffin so, if bones were found, the reader would know that Anna Goodman had been a flesh and blood woman, a woman who had loved and been loved.
Lily took a pencil and spiral notebook. She sat at the table and palmed her forehead as she thought. After a moment, she wrote:
Anna Parsons Goodman
Born in Covington, Virginia the 7th day of the Month of the Bony Moon
She erased “the Month of the Bony Moon” and replaced it with the word “February.”
in the year of our Lord - 1921
Married Clint Goodman the 24th day of March in 1937
in Wise, Virginia at the court house
Widowed in Breakline Mining Camp by a rogue coal truck the 22nd day of July 1945
Mother of Lily Marie Goodman who was born
October 9th in 1944
Moved to Boone Station October 24th of 1946
Passed from this earth
She left the rest blank. She took a mason jar from the shelf over the washstand, found a lid and put her mother’s obituary and the pencil stub inside. She placed the jar back on its shelf. The thought of babies and jars in the old church and how little her mama’s life had come to made her shiver. An unborn child settling in a jar of alcohol and less than half a piece of paper to verify its existence. Lily needed to add something that would make her mother a real person. She took out the paper, scratched through the words “Passed from this earth” and added, My mama was a woman who made do.