THE FOLLOWING WEEK, JIMMIE LOU AND HERSCHEL ANNOUNCED THEIR engagement. The wedding, within the month, was a simple ceremony at the church, unremarkable compared to the shivaree Herschel’s friends and Jimmie Lou’s brothers perpetrated afterward. Amanda told Christie that on the wedding night, Herschel carried Jimmie Lou to the Longs’ house in town, and his parents and uncles and grandmother and several children kept them up late, showing them albums and telling family histories—even serving some fortified wine called sherry. Amanda was wide-eyed as she told about the wine. She said, “And then Herschel’s friends come by in a big carriage and carried him off and stranded him out on the Ulster Road without his britches—till nearly midnight—leaving Jimmie Lou in this nest of strangers! She said they all set around her, all stiff and straight as cow prods, talking at her and asking questions till she thought she’d cry. She said they wanted to know all about your babies, Christie—like they were crops that failed.”
Amanda paused for Christie to say something, but Christie was staring above the wash-house at a patch of sky between two walnut trees and thinking how empty and pale it looked, like a drained milk bucket.
“And then,” Amanda went on, “about one o’clock in the morning, the Wheeler boys did their dirty work. Thurman and some cousins made a dumb-bull noisemaker. They stuck it underneath the weather-board near the bedroom window where Jimmie Lou and Herschel had finally gotten together. The boys said it made the most ungodly noise! It must have scared Jimmie Lou right out of her clothes, if nothing else got her out of them.”
Amanda’s face had not been so animated since the first time the train stopped and the passengers charged across the field to see the babies. She looked so young when she had something to tell. Her skin, with its faint dusting of freckles, was rosy and fresh. Christie imagined Amanda growing old, still watching out the window for somebody interesting to come by.
“Jimmie Lou found out one thing for sure that night,” Amanda continued. “Herschel has a scar from here to here—all up and down his stomach and chest. It must be two foot long! He got it from shooting anvils one Christmas. He hadn’t made the fuse long enough, and when he lit that fuse the black powder he’d jammed down in the holes wasn’t packed in good, and some of it was scattered out between the two stacked-up anvils. And that went shooting out and caught a stick that went flying right at him. Jimmie Lou talked about that scar like she was right proud of it, like it was something to pet!”
Christie felt indifferent to Jimmie Lou’s future, to Maggie’s new baby, even to Amanda’s cheerfulness. She felt betrayed by the way Alma dragged her to the funeral parlor, when she had been drawn to town by her own desire to go somewhere, to get away from the sad reminders at home. Sometimes at the Wheelers’ Sunday dinners, she felt like jumping up and screaming so they would notice her anguish, but she was not sure she would get their attention even then. And she was not sure she wanted it. Most of the time, she wanted her isolation.
After church on the first Sunday following the wedding, the family gathered at Wad’s for dinner, as usual—everybody except Jimmie Lou and Herschel. Alma declared that Jimmie Lou must believe she was too good for them now. Maggie and the new baby were there, and the whole family seemed surprised by how large the little girl was, after being used to the five tiny creatures Christie had borne.
“She’s stout already,” said Amanda, lifting the infant and blowing playfully into her face.
“Jimmie Lou’ll be back by Christmas with her tail between her legs,” said Alma. “Mark my words. But she’s made her bed and she can lay in it.”
“I’d allow she done right good,” said Thomas, who had come home late the night before. He never went to church. “Jimmie Lou never even had no luck at a box supper, and now she’s hitched to a fine young man with a family business.” Thomas turned to Christie, then James. “If it hadn’t been for you good folks and what you did, Jimmie Lou would have ended up with some farm boy that couldn’t spell his way out of a buttermilk jug and thought chess was just a kind of pie. Now she’s got somebody that can teach her things.”
“But Jimmie Lou likes to get out in the fields,” Alma said. “She likes to pick berries. She likes to pitch horseshoes. Can you feature her a-throwing a oyster supper?”
“Where’s my cake?” Arch demanded in a whining voice.
“What cake?” Alma said innocently.
It was Arch’s tenth birthday, and Alma had kept him in a state of misery all morning by pretending she had forgotten about his special ten-year cake. For a child to live to his tenth year was always a cause of celebration. Christie recalled when her brother Luther turned ten and got his cake.
Arch began to cry, and Thomas shook his head sadly. “Ten year old and still a-crying like a baby.”
“He wants his cake,” Amanda said, patting the boy gently on the head.
“Shut up that sniveling, Arch,” said Wad, as some of Alma’s blackberry cobbler landed with a splat on his plate. “Did I ever tell you about old Inch Burke?”
“Naw.” The boy kicked at the rungs of his chair.
Wad leaned back in his chair, balancing on the two hind legs. “One day the Lord told Inch either to kill one of his chillern or cut off a hand. So Inch took a ax and chopped his hand off. He laid his arm down on a stump like he was fixing to kill a chicken and just whacked his hand off.”
“Plumb off?” Arch’s mouth hung open and his nose was running.
“The Lord said be snappy about it, so Inch, he just went for the ax. Then he got lockjaw and couldn’t open his mouth, so he had to eat soup. And one day his teeth got to bothering him. So he went to town and the dentist said, ‘I can’t pull them teeth if you can’t get your mouth open!’ So Inch went back to the creek and set on a rock and took a knife and prized his mouth open and gouged out his own teeth. Wellsir, that finished him!”
“Imagine doing that one-handed,” Joseph said, winking at Arch.
All the men laughed, and then Henry said, “I remember Maddie Burke, his widder. She was a sight full of aggervation.”
“Now, Arch, that just goes to show what some folks will do for their chillern,” Wad said. “But don’t count on it.”
“In the Bible, Abraham had to sacrifice Isaac, and the Lord didn’t say nothing about no hand,” said Alma.
Suddenly Amanda, holding an empty gravy bowl, marched over to her husband at the head of the table and said in a shrill voice, “I’d be ashamed!” She turned to Alma, who was collecting dirty plates. “It’s the boy’s birthday,” Amanda said.
Glaring at Amanda, Alma grabbed Thomas’s empty plate. She carried the plates into the kitchen and returned with Arch’s cake. Arch jumped up with a shout. The beam on his face could have sliced the cake.
“A little cake that’s all yours!” Amanda said lovingly to Arch. “A ten-year cake is the most special thing there is.”
Alma had made two layers in her smallest pans and covered the little cake with boiled white icing that glistened like iced-over snow. Arch grabbed the red candied cherry on top and ate it.
“Reckon you’re old enough to start cutting tobaccer this year, little man?” said Wad, rising from the table.
“Tobaccer’s the nastiest thing I know of,” Amanda said, as she set a tea pitcher on the table.
Wad laughed, and the others joined in. Amanda went outside, slamming the front door. Christie could see her on the porch with the old bird dog, Buford. She thought the laughter seemed awkward and fearful. Joseph and Henry laughed loudly, their laughter siding with their father’s. James looked up at Christie, as if asking her apology for joining in with the men’s humor. Christie turned away. Dove, eating in her corner, dug around in her mashed potatoes as though she were hunting for something. Christie gave Nannie a piece of chicken wing and then went to the porch where Amanda was petting the dog.
“Come on in and eat, Mandy,” Christie said.
“When Wad chews, it’s like a cow and her cud,” Amanda said. “But at least a cow’s chewing sweet grass. Tobaccer’s plumb nasty.” She spoke to the dog. “Reckon you’d ever take up chewing, Buford?” The dog lay down with a groan.
“James finds a heap of satisfaction in working tobaccer,” Christie said. “But it’s right toilsome.”
“Oh, it’s toilsome,” Amanda said with a shudder. “I purely dread cutting time.”
“Come on in, Mandy. Dinner’s getting cold.”
When the women sat down to eat, Boone talked about the album he was making, with the clippings and letters Christie had let him have. The men had finished eating and had scattered into the parlor, except for Boone, who ate slowly. He rose from his place so that Alma could sit down.
“You spent all day yesterday a-making on that book,” said Alma.
“He got glue all over the floor,” said Dulcie.
“I cleaned it up,” protested Boone.
“When can we see the album?” asked Lena.
“Not till it’s done with,” Boone said. “But I got something else to show you.”
He took something from his pocket and hid it behind his back, then held out his fists to Nannie, who bashfully picked one. Slowly, he opened his fist. Inside was a little bed with five tiny dolls in it, all between sheets. The bed was made of wood, and the dolls were rubber. They were covered with a rectangle of calico.
“It’s for your dollhouse,” Boone told Nannie.
The girls crowded around to look. “Did you make it?” Lena asked.
“A feller give it to me the other day. Said he got it at the funeral.”
“I seen somebody a-selling them,” said Wad, as the men drifted back toward the table to look at Boone’s surprise. “I seen several folks shell out fifty cents for one of those.”
“You’re wishing you’d thought of it, Daddy,” said Joseph.
“It’s a souvenir,” said Mary Ann, holding the little object up to the light.
Christie saw James gazing out the window, his face like a hollowed gourd. She speared a chicken liver and cut it up in small pieces for Nannie. On Sundays, Amanda always set up a small table so the children wouldn’t have to wait till last.
“Eat your dinner, Nannie,” Christie said. She started collecting chicken bones for the cats.
The family had spoken little about the babies. Now the subject dropped like a bucket down a well. The men, still standing around, turned to tobacco talk. Wad said he didn’t expect to come out ahead on tobacco this year. Henry, with the new baby, needed the cash crop, but Wad wanted to hold it off the market for a year until prices went up.
“They ain’t gonna give nothing for it,” said Joseph, as he rolled a cigarette. “I go along with Daddy to hold back on it this year.”
“If we don’t make a good yield and they don’t want to pay us nothing for it, then we won’t get much anyhow,” Wad said. “We’re just as well to hold on to it till they need it.”
“Folks will always need tobaccer,” said Joseph to Henry.
“There’s too much of it as it is,” said Wad, pulling out his own plug. He sold his tobacco crop loose-leaf, unpressed, but he bought chewing tobacco at the store because it had sweetening in it.
“James, you’re better off without five extra younguns to feed,” said Henry, nodding toward his own new baby.
Maggie laughed in a girlish manner that made Christie want to strangle her. Maggie wasn’t holding the new baby right, and she didn’t see how it was fretting. Maybe it would die.
Christie dumped scrapings into the slop bucket. Then she took the scraps out to the dogs. From the side of the house, she saw Wad come out to the porch and spit into a snowball bush. She wondered what it would be like to chew tobacco. Tobacco plugs smelled sweet but made such a vile liquor of spittle. She couldn’t imagine kissing anybody who chewed. James didn’t chew, but still she wouldn’t kiss him now. She hoped Clint and Jewell would never chew. Already Thurman had his own cigarettes, which he rolled and smoked in town or behind the barn.
Today the talk of tobacco and the smell of burnt onions and the sight of congealed bacon grease on a bowl of wilted lettuce all ran together, coalescing into a particular memory she’d forever associate with this moment. She prized each sensation. Everything was of equal importance, nothing favored, the way each baby grabbed her and wouldn’t let her choose one over the other. As she went back indoors, she heard the word “feathers.” The men were still standing around, while the women worked in the kitchen.
“Why, a feather bed is one of the most valuable possessions in a house,” said Thomas.
“Red meat and feathers,” said Henry.
Thomas said, “Little Bunch, wasn’t you the one that found them things?”
Little Bunch nodded sullenly and gouged out a chunk of blackberry cobbler from the pan with her fingers. She sucked on it.
Thomas said, “I never did see ’em. What’d they look like?”
“Bird nests,” Little Bunch said, making a circle with both hands. “Big birds.”
Thomas sat back in his straight chair, leaning at a precarious angle. He said, “I’ve got people down at this little store in Nutbush that say they’ve seen ’em big as a hornet’s nest.”
“How would you sleep on a piller with that in it?” demanded Alma.
“They was going to die,” said Little Bunch.
Lena slapped her sister’s hand. “No, it means they’re in Heaven. Mama said.”
“I’ve heard it’s a sign of death,” said Boone. “But why would there be just two? That’s the why of it.”
“The weather was so changeable, they took the pneumony,” Maggie said knowingly.
“Them babies was wooled to death,” said Alma. “Just like a old dog got aholt of ’em and wooled ’em. I saw one of the dogs a-shaking a possum out by the corncrib the other day. That’s what all that handling did.”
Christie finished drying the platter that had held the roast hen. She carried the platter into the parlor to the china safe. She set it inside, upright in the back, behind where the Sunday plates and glasses would go. She closed the glass door of the safe and walked out the front door, leaving behind the tobacco talk, the idle gossip, Thomas Hunt’s bragging, old Dove’s moans, Boone’s wheezes. Christie walked out of the house and down the porch steps and down the lane. She didn’t even think to take Nannie with her. She felt unattached, unburdened by anyone pulling at her. She walked all the way to the railroad before she remembered that she had simply been headed home.
She turned back, and James caught up with her at the fence by the tobacco patch. The dogs scampered around him eagerly. The bird dog, Buford, hung back to sniff at something dead, and Luke, the collie, halted, waiting for him to catch up.
“Go on, boys,” James said to the dogs. He laid his hands on Christie’s shoulders. “I didn’t know about that doll bed,” he said. “Nobody meant to hurt your feelings, Chrissie. They don’t know they’re doing that.”
“Well, they must be stupid,” she said. “How has Mandy lived with them all these years?”
“That’s just the way they all are,” James said. “They’re hard-hearted and hard-headed, but I know they don’t mean it.”
“But what Alma said is true—the babies were wooled to death.”
“We couldn’t stop it, though,” James said. “People would have busted in.”
“I don’t want to be here,” she said. The hound, Zeke, sauntered up and collapsed lazily at James’s feet.
“I’m so sorry, Chrissie,” he said, drawing nearer. “But I’ve been thinking out there in the fields, all these long days. And I don’t believe God means for us to keep blaming ourselves. I don’t believe He meant for us just to dry up inside and blow away. I think He wants us to keep on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe He means for us to try again—have another one.”
She shook her head no. She remembered her mother saying to do what James asked when they were married. But somehow that no longer applied. She didn’t really believe he meant what he was suggesting. They couldn’t ever replace those babies. She said, “We didn’t do a good job. How could He trust us again?”
James pulled a long stem of timothy and absently rolled it between his fingers. “Do you want us to go back to Dundee?” he asked.
“No. I wish we could, but our place is here.”
She spied a tobacco worm on a leaf and reached down to pluck it. The fat thing wiggled between her fingers; its head waved, searching. Last week James had sent Clint and Jewell out with buckets to pick the tobacco worms. They thought killing worms was a great amusement. The green worms were hard to see, hidden on plants and mimicking tobacco leaves. Now Christie wondered what it would be like to be a tobacco worm, hiding and disappearing in the obvious, like a blue quilt-piece against the blue sky, an exact match. What would a tobacco worm see? Would the worm know pain when a little boy pinched its head off? She dropped the worm onto the hard dirt and flattened it beneath her shoe.
“Wad’s worried about the crop,” James said. “I’m afraid if we hold the tobaccer off the market the other farmers will make trouble for us. But I don’t see how I can go against Wad.” He gazed out over the tobacco patch. Some of the leaves were already turning yellow, the dust settling through a haze of hot sun. “I feel so bad,” he said. “The tobaccer didn’t work out, and I counted so much on this dark-fire when we moved here.”
“But it’s pretty,” she said.
The tobacco was beautiful in the fields, dark as night in some lights. Sometimes it was like the skin of a dark green watermelon. James, it seemed to her, didn’t see it the way she did, his mind was so full of what had to be done. But when she saw it in the mornings, in the first sunlight, the sight was breathtaking. The rows led off into the distance, the plants lined up perfectly like soldiers. When they planted the slips in the pegged holes, setting them on the check, James was insistent that they be lined up perfectly straight, and spaced so precisely.