CHRISTIE’S RELIEF MADE HER MIND WHIRL DIZZILY. THE TERROR IN her womb made sense now. And it even seemed fitting that there were so many babies. She and James had gotten carried away with their secret pleasures, and finally it had caught up with them. Sometimes Christie would brim over with laughter just thinking about the delicious privacy of it. No one had known how industriously she and James went at it. She could feel herself blushing, even now in her semiconsciousness, as she struggled to comprehend the truth of what she had achieved. Five babies lay on the bed beside her. She thought she must be dreaming. She had often wondered what people would think if they knew what she and James had done—how often and where, how they had enjoyed it shamelessly. Now they would suspect.
There wasn’t even a word for it. She had never heard it spoken about, except in the vaguest terms. Vulgar schoolgirls snickered about “making babies.” It was “what they did in the dark,” “the matrimonial union,” “the marriage bed,” “planting seed,” “joining like animals.” Mama referred to it as “the wifely duty.” Christie and James found a whimsical word of their own for it—“plowing.” Sometimes, when they ventured into unexplored territory of surprising sensations, James talked about plowing new-ground. She knew it was shameful to enjoy it so much. It was sinful if you weren’t married. There were words for that in the Bible: fornication, whoring. A woman who sinned got herself talked about for the rest of her life. Besides, Christie had heard that a person could overindulge, causing the body to be drained of energy and health. A man who didn’t marry was likely to engage in the worst vice, self-abuse. Christie’s Uncle Zollicoffer took Lion Tonic to build up his strength, and her mother had hinted at the reason, warning Christie of the temptations the devil would strow in the path of the righteous.
Years before, back in Dundee, when Christie and James started sparking, Mama said, “We don’t know his people.” Mama was rattled by his rough, dashing ways—precisely what attracted Christie. He would ride up to her father’s blacksmith shop, straight from working in his mother’s tobacco patch. He would halt the horse so quickly it would rare up with him. From the garden, Christie would see him coming and run into the house to hide herself, for there she was in some faded old dress and that ugly green sunbonnet that had too much stiffening in it. Through the window, she would watch him shooting the breeze with her father, who was out shoeing a horse or straightening a buggy axle. James acted as though he had just been passing by. He was tall and limber, with thick, glistening chestnut hair and a sly grin. He didn’t go to their church. He seemed to be set slightly apart from the community, because he had been born and raised a hundred and fifty miles west—over in Hopewell, beyond the two big rivers. If I marry him, he’ll take me away from here, she thought.
All that season, she concealed her excitement. She found herself churning butter to a rhythm of “James loves Christie, Christie loves James.” She unmolded the butter and furtively traced his initials at the edge of the fern design pressed into the yellow surface. She saw meaningful patterns in the fan of sunrays beneath billowy clouds; in clusters of baby chicks; in the glow of a hen egg; in the way a pair of birds sat on a branch, careful not to get too close to each other. “We don’t know his people,” her pa would say out of the blue, several hours after her mother said it.
Papa judged James to be well-intentioned but doubted he would be able to provide for Christie. James lived with his mother and sister on some poor land that ran on a rocky slant, and they had only one cow.
“He don’t have no place to carry ye to,” said her pa. “He’ll be carrying ye to live with his mammy, and then ye’ll be waiting on her hand and foot.”
“She’s feeble,” Mama put in. “I see her name on the sick list in the paper ever so often. She had a congestive chill back in the winter.”
“Maybe she’ll die,” said Christie impatiently.
“Christianna!” said Mama, looking hurt.
Papa shook his head. “Wash Simmons down at the sawmill told me I needed to marry ye off to get ye out of that schoolhouse. Wash says he never seed a girl to keep on after the twelfth grade, when it’s done over with.”
Mr. Maynard had let her continue coming to school, insisting she would make a good schoolteacher if she didn’t marry. He furnished her with additional history books and drilled her in the subject each morning. The maps of China and Europe intrigued her most, places so far away they almost could not be believed. But then she asked him for a history of Kentucky, and she memorized facts about Andrew Jackson’s purchase of land from the Chickasaws in 1818. The western tip of Kentucky, the upper portion of the Purchase, was hemmed by rivers. It touched the Mississippi River like the toe of a boot, the book said, but Christie’s father said the shape on the map looked more like a pile of hen drop. The ball at the toe of the boot—the New Madrid bend of the Mississippi River—was the center of the devastating earthquake that in late 1811 had rumbled all the way to the East Coast and rattled dishes at the White House. Paducah was the main city in the Purchase now, but Hopewell was a thriving town of two thousand souls who entertained themselves with oyster suppers and hops and Valentine drawings, according to one of the accounts Christie eagerly read. The surrounding land, part prairie, begged for grain and tobacco. One book said the rivers provided the humidity to keep the summertime green, so green that when the first white settlers floated down the Cumberland from Nashville and turned onto the Tennessee River, they selected the area because it reminded them of Ireland. But another history book said it reminded the settlers of England.
Her parents let James come on Sunday afternoons and sit with her in the shut-off parlor, while her younger sisters, Eunice and Emily, giggled in the hallway. Or he would take her riding in his buggy if the weather was fine. Once, though, they were caught in a surprise rain and took shelter in a schoolhouse, where they sat side by side at a desk made for two small children. He nudged her, pretending he didn’t see he was scooting her out of the seat. She nudged back, pushing him playfully. Then her awareness of their bodies pressing each other in their damp clothes made her cheeks flame. Her fingers caught hold of the inkwell hole in the desk, and she yanked herself upright. She marched to the blackboard.
“I’m the teacher,” she said, teasing. With chalk, she wrote her name: Christianna Wilburn. “Recite this, please,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am! Chrissie-tanna Will-be-yourn,” he said solemnly. “Where’s your middle name at?”
“I ain’t got one. Mama thought my name was two words. Christie Anna. But it’s one word. What’s your middle name?”
He shifted position, draping his long arms languidly over the small desk, his legs jutting out into the aisle. He was as loose-limbed as a jumping jack. He stood up and came forward. She thought he was going to kiss her. Instead he wrote his full name on the board, James Reid Wheeler. He stacked the three words vertically, so that Wheeler came to rest just after her name.
CHRISTIANNA WILBURN WHEELER
Her eyes raced past his smooth good looks to the rain outside. It was letting up, and already the hot summer air was steaming.
It was true that the Wilburns didn’t know his people over in Hopewell, but they knew his local relations. His mother’s kin, the Reids, were early settlers of Dundee. As for James’s adventuresome father, John Wheeler had come to Dundee as an itinerant carpenter and wound up marrying Pernecia Reid. He took her to Hopewell, to the Wheeler family farm. When James was sixteen, his father was kicked in the head by a mule with a loose shoe, and he lived only a week. After that, Mrs. Wheeler returned to Dundee with her children. Now James helped his mother run the small farm her parents left when they died. James didn’t finish school.
He told Christie he burned to go back to Hopewell, a climate where dark-leaf tobacco thrived. He claimed the dark tobacco, which was cured by fires burning beneath it when it was hanging in the barns, was more satisfying to work than the golden leaf raised in Dundee.
“One of these days, I aim to go back and live on my daddy’s place, where I was raised,” he told Christie’s parents. “I aim to have fields of dark tobaccer and a fruit orchard and a herd of cattle and a stable full of horses, as well as pigs and hens and geese. I aim to have just about everything that’ll grow or walk—just as soon as Uncle Wad turns loose of that section of land I’m supposed to have. I get fifty acres, and then I want to buy some more from him.”
“Gooseberry bushes,” Christie said, as if she were asking for the moon.
James promised her gooseberry bushes and a flock of banty hens if she wanted them. A peacock too.
“He talks mighty big talk,” Papa allowed that evening, after the younger children had gone to bed.
“He’s young,” said Mama.
“He could charm the pants off of a snake,” Papa said.
“Hopewell is too far away,” Mama said, knotting a thread.
Mama seemed to have forgotten that Lake Wilburn had courted her down in Tennessee and brought her all the way up from Smith County, her home, to live in Dundee. Her full name was Mary Tennessee Rhodes, and he always called her Tennie, as though she were a souvenir of that state.
“Go on and marry him, Christie,” Granny Wilburn said. “A young girl needs to marry and raise a family.” Granny was always dispensing advice, which Christie ordinarily ignored.
But gloomy Aunt Sophie Rhodes, Mama’s sister, who had lived with them for as long as Christie could remember, said, “So many girls marry too young and it kills them.”
“Hush, Sophie,” said Mama. “You’ll give the girl bad dreams.”
“But you know it’s true. They can’t wait to start out. And their constitutions can’t stand it.”
Aunt Sophie coughed and spit into her brass spittoon, a little cup shaped like a rooster, with a hinged lid. All her life, Christie had seen that rooster tail pop down, the rooster rare back to crow, and Sophie spitting into the little cavity beneath. She’d spit and say “Cock-a-doodle-do” almost in the same breath and motion.
Christie’s parents gave the preacher a ham and two silver dollars. One Saturday in July, Mama killed a fattened hen and made lady cake, and the neighbors and family brought more meat and cakes. The next day, James brought his mother and his sister in a wagon, along with a ham and some new-potatoes. The kinfolks from Tennessee brought watermelons, which were already ripe down there. The flies were buzzing, the horses gave off hot oat-breath, and the chickens fluffed their feathers lazily in their dust bowls. A child collected a jar full of potato bugs. In the middle of the afternoon, Granny Wilburn had to lie down with her racing heart in the front room, where the breeze rippled the dotted-Swiss curtains. Christie’s mama laughed, recalling how Granny had behaved the same way the day Mama married Lake. Both Emily and Eunice, Christie’s sisters, spilled lemonade on their fresh white dresses, and during the ceremony their brothers, Luther and Jack, got in a little fight over a bluetick hound that had turned up. Christie felt a swelling desire churn through her, an anticipation of lying in James’s arms at last. They were standing under the largest oak tree in the yard, and a spider was dangling down over the preacher’s head, spinning and wrapping her silk around a grasshopper that had just blundered into her web. The spider rolled the grasshopper with silk, over and over, like a store clerk wrapping a package and tying it with string. Christie felt her desire winding around and around. She almost broke out laughing when she heard the preacher say, “Christianna Wilburn, do you take this man . . . ?” She forgot what to say. Brother Woodall had to repeat, “Christianna Wilburn, do you take this man?” James elbowed her; Papa cleared his throat. She heard her little brothers fussing, her mama threatening under her breath to get the switch. The stray bluetick got beneath the long table, where the food waited under white tablecloths. Christie was taken outside of herself, as though she had been knocked out of her senses and thrown sprawling for a tumbling somerset across the sky before floating back down to earth. Everything was unbelievable. And so funny she thought she would not be able to restrain the runaway inner mirth that boiled like a mineral spring.
There was an electric charge in the air, like the atmosphere before a summer storm. But the sun was shining and there were no clouds.
“I do,” she said.
“I got you now,” said James after they kissed. His grin spread out like a slice of mushmelon.
A while later, after almost everyone had finished eating, Christie caught James on the back porch.
“I hope the preacher leaves early so we can dance,” she said when they stole an embrace.
“You naughty girl.”
“I want to dance.”
“We’ve got plenty of time for dancing,” he said. “We’ll be dancing through the cornfields and up the creek and down the tobaccer patch.”
And then he grabbed her hands and whirled her around. He danced her out into the yard, as if there were music. The preacher’s mouth flew open and he dropped the chicken leg he was eating. The bluetick hound grabbed it. Christie’s cousins—two dozen of them—gasped, but the younger ones giggled and joined the dance, spinning around giddily. Aunt Sophie hacked, and her cock-a-doodle-do sounded louder than she probably intended. Mama cried, “Christie Anna! Don’t drag that hem in the dirt. All them hours a-hemming on that.”
“This ain’t dancing, Brother Woodall,” James said as they romped through the yard past the preacher. “It just looks like dancing.”
“The devil will get you on your wedding night!” said Aunt Sophie with a frown. She disapproved of everything pleasurable, including sunrises and boiled custard.
“Get that grin off of your face, Aunt Sophie,” Christie said, prancing away with James through the hot, thick grass.
Wash Simmons laughed. “Look at them young people go. Durn, I wisht the preacher would let me play my fiddle.”
Christie heard Aunt Sophie mutter, “It’s nine months from the marriage bed to the deathbed.”
Brother Woodall had found another piece of chicken and was holding it up high, away from the dog.
The women packed the wagon with pies and cakes and salads of chicken and ham; watermelon-rind preserves; extra watermelons; bread; fresh eggs. They set the presents in: vegetable and flower seeds, hair ribbons, brushes, butcher knives, coal-oil lamps, and a twenty-piece set of china dishes that several of the Tennessee relations went in on together. Mama piled Christie’s feather bed in the back of the wagon, along with the sheets and quilts and coverlets she had helped Christie make over several winters. Aunt Sophie gave Christie a chair doily she had been tatting for years. It was familiar, and Christie was surprised to learn it was for her. “I was tatting it for you all along, Christie,” said Aunt Sophie. Christie thought she would cry.
In James’s wagon, with two patient old horses, the newlyweds traveled a mile and a quarter to the plain white house where James lived with his mother and his sister. In a small, dark room upstairs, after Christie dressed the spool bed with her feather bed and sheets and quilts, they began the part nobody ever talked about.