AUGUST CONTINUED DRY AND HOT, WITH ONE GENTLE SHOWER THAT did little good. The tobacco was yellowing, and the tomato vines were burning up. Christie and James had promised Greenberry McCain they could leave soon after the tobacco was cut and the other crops were laid by. And he said they would be back home before the last of pea time. Wad assured James that he and his sons would be able to gather James’s corn crop; so much of it had been damaged by ant cattle sucking out the roots the job wouldn’t take them long.
Mr. McCain had been out visiting. In his Sunday clothes, he had walked over the fields, admiring the tobacco. He wore polished shoes made of leather so thin his toe knuckles showed. He brought presents for the children—a clown doll for Nannie, two softballs and a ball bat for the boys. The boys batted at the new, clean, sweet-smelling balls until they lost them both somewhere in the tobacco patch. Mr. McCain said his mother (“now gone to her heavenly rest”) used to have a cast-iron range just like Christie’s, and he remembered with great pleasure her canned tomato juice and pickled peaches. He had been raised on a farm, but he was a city man now, making his headquarters in Montgomery, where he lived with his wife and four children. He traveled widely through the South country. “Just seeing this great land of ours is the supreme satisfaction,” he said. He had started out selling sheet music, a fact that interested the Wheelers because Thomas Hunt had once been in the same line.
“I got out of sheet music right before rags got so popular, and I keep threatening to get back in,” said Mr. McCain to Christie, as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to Nannie.
A penny was knotted loosely in the corner of the handkerchief. When the shy little girl finally got the penny out, she dropped it on the ground and started to cry.
“Here it is, Punkin,” said Christie, picking up the penny and shielding Nannie in her apron. “What do you say to the nice man? Say ‘Thank ye.’”
“What’s that man’s nose so big for?” Nannie asked Christie in a loud whisper.
Mr. McCain laughed heartily. “Because I keep it out of other folks’ business and let it grow!”
Mr. McCain treated them courteously, always with respect for their wishes, Christie wrote to her mother. He said he knows how we’ll miss Nannie and the boys, but we’ll never be so far away from home that we can’t get back real quick if one of the children is sick. Lena is in such a fret to go along, and Jimmie Lou now says she wishes she hadn’t got married and settled down to being an old lady because she wants to go! But I think Mandy, secretly, is the most envious. I believe she wishes she could just run away from home. She and Wad used to tease each other so lovingly, but now there’s a bushel of hard feelings between them. I hate to see Mandy in such despair. She’s my best friend in the whole world.
One morning Christie and Amanda speculated about the trip as they peeled peaches on Christie’s front porch. Amanda said cheerfully, “Now, Christie, you just go on out there and enjoy the sights and write back what you’re doing. And don’t worry none about Nannie and the boys. Dulcie and Lena and me will watch them every minute and they won’t be ne’er a bit of trouble.”
“I’m afraid the boys will be a burden,” said Christie.
“No, they won’t. They’ll be out with the men. Christie, this is a lifetime opportunity! Now you go on out there and have a elephant time.”
“I’m not scared,” said Christie.
“I wouldn’t expect you to be,” Amanda said. She tossed a peach seed at a chicken venturing into the petunias. “But oh, Christie, what they want you to do—do you think you can bear it?”
“Yes, I can,” Christie said, reaching for a peach in the bucket on the floor. “I’m going to let the whole world see. I’m going to show them what they done to us.”
Amanda touched Christie’s cheek, pinching off a speck of something that had landed on her. She said, “Christie, just don’t lose your faith.”
“Oh, I’ve got faith,” Christie said. She peeled the peach without a break in the spiral. “And I’ve got that lock of hair you asked me for. It’s in my pocket.”
“I wanted it for a keepsake.”
Christie cut her peach in half and gouged out the seed. She wished Amanda were going with her on the trip. She said, “Don’t you think I’ll come back?”
“I wouldn’t if I was you. Oh, I know you’d have to come back and get the chillern, but if you could just keep going, wouldn’t you?”
“I believe I might,” Christie said, gazing toward the railroad tracks.
At dinner on Sunday, Christie and Amanda huddled in the kitchen corner by the stove. They weren’t talking about anything in particular. They just seemed to be keeping close company. Alma spooned up a bowl of shelly beans from the kettle. Christie and Amanda followed her to the table with bowls of squash and mashed potatoes.
Alma said, “The paper said James and Christie owed it to everybody to get out there and meet the public. Is that a fact?”
“That’s what they’re saying in town, Mama,” said Thurman, reaching for the beans.
“Everybody oughter mind their own business,” said Alma. “The very idie, sending James and Christie out to kingdom come when there’s so much work to be done.”
“They ain’t doing this job for free,” said Wad, with his mouth full.
“The preacher believes it’s a good idie,” said Henry. “That’s what he meant this morning about not hiding your light under a bushel basket. I’d allow he was talking about you, Christie.”
“Oh, reckon he meant Christie?” said Maggie, who was in a corner nursing her baby, a little girl with a saucer face and a stupid look.
“Christie’s too bashful about her talents,” said Boone. “That makes me recollect the woman that walked a tightrope over Niagara Falls—with her feet in bushel baskets. She wasn’t bashful.”
Alma set the bowl of beans down and roared. Thomas had brought that story back for Boone once from some paper he picked up.
“Well, Christie’s been too peaked to get out and strut lately,” Alma said. “Why, she ain’t said boo to Maggie’s little baby here. She’s just lost the will to make over a baby, I reckon.”
“I feel stout as a horse,” Christie said, glaring at Alma. “I’m working as hard as I ever did.” She changed the topic, remembering to tell Thomas what Mr. McCain had said about sheet music. “He said the big thing now is rags,” she said.
“I didn’t know people peddled rags nowadays,” Alma said. “Most everybody here hangs on to their rags.”
“He meant they make the paper out of rags,” Amanda said.
“That’s not what he meant,” said Thomas. “He meant a kind of music they call rags. It’s everywhere.”
“There you go, making me out a ignorant country woman,” Alma said, stalking off into the kitchen.
“Oh, I feel so dumb,” wailed Amanda. “I didn’t know rags was music either.”
“A hundred dollars a week,” Wad said incredulously as he emerged from the stupor that often accompanied his feeding. “Christie and James go off for part of September, October, November. Ten weeks,” he said, spreading out his fingers. “A thousand dollars. That’s more’n we’d all get from the whole tobaceer crop and wheat and corn put together.”
“And all the traveling expenses is paid,” said Joseph, reaching for the salt. “Meals and hotels.”
“Wonder what they’ll feed you,” said Amanda.
“It won’t be as good as home cooking,” said Alma, showing her face again. “What you eat out ain’t fitten to eat.”
“Sometimes it is,” Thomas said. “I’ve been fed good on the road.”
“I wish I could go out and eat somebody else’s cooking,” Amanda said as she dumped a ladle of mashed squash onto her husband’s plate. “I wonder what those rags sound like.”
Alma said, “Law, I’d feel plumb helpless if I had to depend on strangers for my grub, not knowing who growed it or how it was put up.”
Amanda said, “Alma, now don’t talk Christie out of going!”
“Oh, I ain’t worried about Christie,” said Alma. “I know she’ll go even if she has to live on jerky and dried ’simmons. She’ll do everwhat she’s of a mind to do.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Christie, calmly forking tomato slices onto the men’s plates. “It used to not be true, but now it is.”
James looked at her oddly but stayed quiet. She felt lighter and stronger every day. Only Nannie pulled her apron strings, anchoring her to the ground. What stirred inside her nowadays felt like ripe peaches splitting their skins.
By the end of August, the tobacco was ready to cut. Clint and Jewell had been playing Master and Slave with tobacco sticks, wanting to be allowed to help cut tobacco. The sticks were sharp and dangerous. The boys pretended they were tobacco knives.
“Can I have a knife like yours when I’m big enough to cut?” asked Clint, whacking at a clod of clay in the yard.
“If you show me you can use it and not cut yourself, you can,” said James. “But if you’re not going to take care of it and treat it with respect, then you ain’t ready.”
Clint hit his tobacco stick repeatedly against the porch rail. “I can cut good. I could cut right now.”
“Yes, and you’d cut your big toe off,” said James.
The next morning, Christie tromped out to the patch in a pair of Alma’s spreadin’-adder shoes and a pair of James’s britches to protect against the sticky tobacco gum. Women never dared to wear britches, but she didn’t care what anybody thought now. As soon as she reached the patch, a bug found its way up the britches leg and tickled her skin. She slapped at it.
“Watch out you don’t get a snake up in them britches,” Wad said.
Joseph, who was cutting in the row ahead, said, “Like that time that necktie creeped out of your britches leg and you thought it was a snake?” Joseph laughed.
“It was in church,” Wad said, laughing at himself.
“He almost joined the Lord, he jumped so high,” Joseph called to Christie.
She hated tobacco cutting. There was an art to it, and she hadn’t mastered it. She had cut only two seasons in the past. Now she was determined to cut this dark-fired tobacco with a vengeance.
The plant had to be split down the stalk, then cut off near the base so that it could be flipped upside down and hung on a long stick. Splitting the stalk required careful aim—the stalks were never quite straight. At first her aim was off. It was like trying to kill a fish flopping in the mud. Tobacco gum coated her hands, stinging a sore on her knuckle. Already the day was blazing hot, and she steamed inside James’s heavy britches. The knife blade glinted in the sun. Follow the seam of the stalk, try to get it in one go—that was the rule. She hacked three times on one stalk. Some leaves fell off. She tried to steady the plant, holding the tip of a leaf that she didn’t dare pull too hard for fear of damaging it. She couldn’t stand too close to the plant or touch its stem or she might cut herself. Each plant, though its stem was hard as a young tree, wavered. From a distance, James watched her, as though waiting to see what she might do. Farther down the field, Joseph’s wife, Mary Ann, split and whacked. She had been cutting for years.
“Oh, bedad!” Wad cried out, at some bug or thought. He split and whacked, split and whacked.
Christie listened to the men talk—laughing and telling stories about farmers whose tobacco barns had burned or who had cut off their toes with their tobacco knives, stories that were funny only in retelling. Now and then the men would stop at the end of a row and sharpen their knives. “No time lost in whetting,” they would say, looking lazy. Christie was intent on the work, absorbing the details—the way the bugs stuck in the gum on her sleeves, the way the tobacco began to droop almost as soon as it was cut. From where she was working, she could see the white of the curtains in her house and the pink of the petunias that the chickens hadn’t scratched up yet.
Christie worked slowly, studying each plant, looking for the center of the stem—the heart, the line down its center—and trying to line up her knife and her swing precisely.
“We ain’t hiring you to make kraut,” Wad yelled at her when she mangled one plant.
“Be careful,” James called to Christie. He had on old boots with rags stuffed in the toes.
In Alma’s shoes she felt as sturdy as the tough tobacco stalks. The rhythm grew smooth. Bend, grab, slide, slip, whack, let fall, bend, grab. Her hands grew gummy. The britches were sticky. With increasing ease, she worked steadily, thinking only about the tobacco plants, each one an individual, having its own requirement for splitting and cutting. The insects drowned on her gummy skin. Her face was darkened with gum and sun, and the sweat running through the sticky residue burned in her eyes till tears washed them out.
For a long while the whole patch was quiet—no one talking, just the grunts and whacks and mutters. Then the men would burst into idle talk for a while, mostly addressing the tobacco plants—“steady there” and “I got you good, damn you” and “Hold still, you cotton-picking bastard.”
Christie still felt exhilarated. Cutting dark-fire was like cutting her shallow roots to this place. She was freeing herself, so she could leave. Three whacks in a row, three perfect cuts. She wondered if old Mammy Dove missed working tobacco—if there was something about it so familiar and ingrained that she couldn’t bear to give up—or whether she was glad to be free of the blisters and burns, the steaming heat, and sticky gum in her eyes. If learning to die was learning to let go of things, would Dove find it easy to let go of something that burned into a person’s skin and eyes and heart?
Christie wasn’t ready to let go of her babies. If the world killed her babies and wanted to see them dead to draw some lessons from them, then she would show people more than they bargained for. She’d show them, with spite burning in her eyes. She could imagine curious faces staring hard enough to bore a hole through her. But she would be ready. She would be master of the scene. She imagined the spectators being unable to depart until each of them had heard the full story, with all the details. They would not leave until they had absorbed her indignation, until she had fully faced them with her babies—fragile, faded leaves. Her eyes would shout at the people. All of the audience would be pinned to the spot as if caught by a bolt of lightning—as if the Lord Almighty had held them hard by the shoulders in a moment of terrifying knowledge and not let them move from the spot until they fully knew her pain and wrath. Then they would slink off, carrying her sickness away from her, never to forget what had happened to her, Christianna Wheeler. They would carry the memory of her like a warming stone a child carries in a pocket to school. The stone would grow cold, yet they would never be able to throw it away or warm it up again.
She swung her knife hard. She envisioned the steady seasons of tobacco: the beating sun, the tobacco curing above the hickory fires in the barns, growing richer and richer in its smell and dark texture, until one damp day it would come “in case”—that particular moment when it was flexible enough to be stripped. After the stripping, it would be prized into hogsheads and sold. But she would be gone. For several weeks, she would be outside that cycle—going off at a tangent, like the stick that drives a child’s hoop.
For a week, they cut tobacco and filled the barns: first Wad’s, then James’s and Henry’s and Joseph’s. After they cut the tobacco, they had to let it wilt in the sun until it could be hung without the leaves breaking. They hung the plants upside down on long sticks that they heaved onto the wagon Henry drove through the field. Although Alma said it was too soon for her to exert herself so, Christie insisted on housing tobacco alongside the men, lifting the heavy, loaded sticks above her shoulders and up to the rafters. The work strengthened her and made her feel more prepared for what was to come.
The sun coming through the cracks in the planks of the barn walls made geometric shafts of light and dust. Tittering sparrows flew through them, gleaming white. The barn seemed like a church. But the beams were random. Nothing important was illuminated. Outside the barn, just visible through the cracks, was a bank of whitetop, the weed farmers hated but that Christie secretly thought was pretty. It was a tiny daisy, hundreds of blooms on a single stalk. This year, the white-top grew in profusion, as delicate as baby’s-breath.
When the firing began, a few days after they finished housing, Boone had a spell of coughing and took to his bed. The hickory smoke that cured the tobacco leaf always seized up his lungs, and he wouldn’t go outside as long as the fires smoldered beneath the tobacco hanging from the rafters.
The first night of the firing, the neighbors set out on a round of night visiting, keeping watch over the fires and staying up long past dark. Mack Pritchard brought new apples and the Culpeppers brought sorghum molasses. The Wheelers provided watermelons and hens. The children played with frantic energy, as though some spirit were operating them like those electric churns Christie had heard about.
“Growing the dark-fire is toilsome work, but it’s worth it just to do it,” James said to Christie. They were behind their barn, looking out into the hayfield where the boys were playing in the near dark. Henry had found one of their balls in the tobacco patch. James said, “If the farmers don’t stick together, the price will just keep going down.” He ran his hand across his forehead. “But maybe it was a mistake to come to the western country here to grow dark-fire,” he said. “If we’d stayed in Dundee, none of this would have happened.”
“You can’t make a hog go backwards,” said Christie.
“All that fuss from all over the whole world, and we ain’t no better off,” said James.
“We’ll see what happens,” said Christie impatiently. She longed to be traveling, learning about new places. It was true—it was a lifetime opportunity.
The girls were playing drop-the-handkerchief at the edge of the pasture. The boys were still playing ball. Christie could hear them calling to each other, yelling insults and warnings. Mr. Mullins would be coming by in the morning for the feather crowns in order to fit them in the glass case he had devised. Greenberry McCain wanted Mrs. Blankenship’s album taken along, as well as the feather crowns and the funeral register. Mr. McCain would have signs and handbills printed up. His lecture would be informative and inspirational, he promised. Christie had thought of all these details over and over, picturing the program in her mind until it stopped shifting shape.
“I have to put out a wash tomorrow and get our clothes together,” Christie said.
“Are you ready to do this?” James asked.
“Except for leaving the children,” she said. “But we have to do it, so we’ll do it. They’ll get by. Mandy will take good care of them. Nobody’s as good with children as Mandy. You know that.”
They could see Amanda moving out toward the girls, her soft, lilting voice meeting theirs. She joined their play, taking her place in the ring, and they all started to move, hand-in-hand, picking up speed until Dulcie, outside the circle, dropped the handkerchief. Christie saw Wad and Henry leave the barn, in serious conversation. They turned up the path to Wad’s house, and on the way they joined the neighbors who were packing up their wagons to leave. Mack Pritchard seemed to have lost his hat, and Ethel Pritchard was getting her clean pie plate back from Alma. Christie felt as if she and James were just watching a scene in a drama. Already, they were far away, looking back.
“Don’t forget this was my idea,” Christie said to James. “I want to do it.”
The sounds of the children playing—a throng of them with their high, trilling shrieks—traveled out through the air, crossing each other and colliding. Joseph was in James’s barn watching the fire, in case a fragment of leaf dropped into the fire and sent the barn up in flames. Anything could happen, Christie thought. But probably nothing would ever happen in their lives that compared to what had already happened to them. That thought made her bold now, as if she had been granted as much power as was necessary or possible. She was ready to confront the world, with all her anger and curiosity and urgency. Then Christie heard Nannie calling her, and she went around the side of the barn.
Bats were flying out of the barn, dipping and whirling like swallows. They had been smoked out by the fires. They would have to find another home during firing season. Christie felt like the bats, having to leave her home for a period until the fires were over. She heard Nannie calling her again, and she hurried into the dark.