AT BREAKFAST IN MRS. CUNNINGHAM’S LODGINGS IN VICKSBURG TWO days later, Christie and James were so absorbed in a letter from Amanda that they didn’t notice Greenberry leave. They hadn’t been speaking to him much. He had brought them the letter from the depot and dropped it on the table. Christie thought he went to read his newspaper in the parlor then, but when they left the dining room, they saw that he had gone.
Mrs. Cunningham stopped them. She was carrying a fly swatter. “Wasn’t you aiming to go with him?” she asked. “He slipped off from here like he was scared of something. And he ain’t paid the bill yet.”
“Did he have the trunk with him?” Christie asked, alarmed.
“Where’s the trunk?” James asked, lurching toward the storeroom near the stairs.
“Oh, it’s right where you left it,” the woman said, rattling the keys in her apron pocket. “The door’s still locked.”
At James’s insistence, she unlocked the door, and he inspected the trunk to his satisfaction. “Did he say where he was going?” he asked.
“I believe he said he was going to Tupelo.”
“That’s where we’re going next, but the train’s not till one o’clock,” James said.
“He’s always got some business somewhere to tend to,” Christie explained to Mrs. Cunningham. “He’ll have to come back and pay the bill.”
“I was kindly surprised at him up so early,” Mrs. Cunningham said, aiming her fly swatter at the door facing, which was scarred with bullet holes from the War. “He didn’t go up to his room till nearly midnight.” She drifted off to the kitchen.
“I wonder what he’s up to now,” James muttered to Christie. “I ’magine he’s out peddling them things on the street.”
Since the circus, they had not seen the box of souvenirs, and Greenberry had not mentioned it. They were used to his absences and were generally glad of them, but since he showed them the souvenirs, they had been wary of his intentions. Christie’s rage at him had collapsed and sunk in her like a hard ball of dough, ready to rise again. She wished she could see the Wiggins sisters.
Christie sat down in a rocking chair in the parlor to mend a sock, while James went outside to the garden house. Mrs. Cunningham’s place was a run-down, two-story brick house with high windows and scarred woodwork. It had once been a fine house belonging to a cotton merchant. Christie gazed out the window at the Spanish moss hanging from the trees. It resembled the gray-green moss that grew like mushrooms in the woods at home—the kind that bloomed with lines of tiny red soldiers. Here, the hanging moss filtered the sunlight and gave a gauzy feel to the atmosphere. Mrs. Cunningham had called the trees live oaks, but they were unlike the oak trees at home. She said the trees with the shiny leaves were magnolias, and she called the bright-flowering vines on the porch “boogerville flowers.”
Christie had read Amanda’s letter aloud to James, and now she read it again to herself, finding fresh angles to each bit of news. Amanda’s handwriting was dainty, as carefully formed as her quilt stitches.
Amanda wrote:
Wad wanted me to tell you your corn crop made good. The crib is full, with thirty-six wagonloads. The boys started stripping tobacco yesterday and Clint and Jewell are stripping like little men. Clint’s pile yesterday weighed fifty-four pounds!
Nannie is so sweet, helping me with everything, and I take her out in the yard and swing her in a swing Wad made for her. He notched out a board for a seat. She was afraid at first but now she goes high. Little Bunch and Lena have been fussing over who gets to look after her. Bunch had some fits, but I truly believe she’s growing out of them. They were just little chicken fits, one at the supper table and one when I was fixing her hair. Wad had a fit too when he found out Lena had been talking to the Price boy down the road! Wad says the Prices are all deadbeats, not worth killing, and of course Lena is too young to be talking to boys. Dulcie, on the other hand, was a popular gal at a box supper at church last Saturday. Bryce Palmer is sweet on her, and he bid a dollar for her box. But Dulcie said later her lemon pie turned out as soggy as a cow pile!
William Jennings Bryan was through here, giving a stirring talk, they say. All of Hopewell was in a whoop. And the revival came and went. A Brother Peevy from Alabama, a little man with a rough face like the skin of a pickle. Christie, did you realize it was nearly a year ago we went to Reelfoot? So much has gone on since then. If we had known then what was going to happen, would it have changed anything?
Jimmie Lou is growing a baby, we all believe. She hasn’t said anything, but she’s filling out. Well, Christie, I keep thinking how life goes on, and there’s always a crop of new babies, just like the new calves and the kittens in the spring. And some of them thrive and some of them are too weak. I guess we have to accept that, for it’s the way of our Creator. I know I can never walk in your shoes, but I know it’s been hard for you, Christie. It must be hard now to look at their little still faces day after day and know they will never pucker up and cry or reach their little arms out to you.
We’re all well, except for Boone. He coughs so much now and wakes up strangled. I asked him your question about the Institute of Man, and he thinks it’s a big place up in the government. He’s heard tell of it and asks why you want to know. He is almost done with his memory book, Alma and me and the girls are all sewing on winter shirts, and I’m making you a surprise. Mammy Dove is still piecing on that quilt. It’s getting dark earlier. Wad and his boys are working till dark. He said tell you he needed your strong hands, James, but not to rush on home and give up that hundred dollars a week. He won’t even spare ten dollars for new shoes for us all this season. How did I marry such a tightwad? You know that’s where he gets his name, I don’t care what he says about any wad of chewing tobacco. Alma said he didn’t know any more about loving than a dead horse does about Sunday. But you should see how proud he is of his new grandbaby. He’s strutting his onions these days!
I miss you and all the fuss you stirred up, and I pray you’ll get home safe again. Have you found that nice couple from Memphis yet? Tell James his dogs are lonesome without him.
Your loving
Amanda
Christie hadn’t read Amanda’s P.S. aloud to James. Amanda wrote:
P.S. Christie, I try to be good and patient, but you’ll never know the sickness in my heart. I wish I could be there with you, so that we could hold each other up. Sometimes I can’t quite hold myself up straight and I don’t know where to turn.
Christie folded the letter, intending to reread it on the train later. The sorrow underlying Amanda’s normally cheerful innocence made Christie feel a sour homesickness she hadn’t felt before.
“Mandy didn’t say what Wad’s aiming to do about the tobaccer,” James said. He had just returned from the garden house, and Christie was working up the courage to visit that filthy little enclosure, which was shrouded with gourd vines.
“Mandy’s got the best heart,” Christie said, forcing the letter down into her pocket. “But she hurts too easy.”
“She don’t ever give herself enough credit,” said James, touching Christie’s shoulder. He was standing and she was sitting. A river of memories flooded her mind: Nannie dressing a kitten up in doll clothes; the boys catching lizards with grass loops; Jewell playing horsey on a limber branch of a hickory tree.
Mrs. Cunningham interrupted them then. She had hard, sunken features that seemed to belie her funny, high voice. “I’m so proud to have a famous personage under my roof,” she said. “Mr. McCain told me all about you. I didn’t get to see the traveling show. I had fourteen to cook for last night and then had to get up before light to raise the bread this morning. I hope you enjoyed your breakfast. Did it suit you?”
James said, “The sausages was hard, and the biscuits was cold.”
“Them sausages has been drying out ever since my stove started acting up on me. It won’t draw good. But I saw you et yours. The light-bread went so fast I had to turn in and whip up some biscuits.”
When Mrs. Cunningham left, Christie said angrily to James, “Why can’t you be more polite?”
“Well, she asked, and I told her. That grub wasn’t fitten to eat.”
“It’s better to be friendly,” said Christie. “Ain’t that what you always tell me? You never want me to say what I think.”
“If her sausages is hard and she asks me, I aim to tell her. It don’t matter what she thinks about me. She ain’t my neighbor.”
Christie said no more. Since the day of the circus, she sometimes contradicted James for no good reason, as though a spirit had suddenly possessed her. On occasion out in public, she took the lead in a conversation, although she knew that made him look bad.
“I’ve a good mind to go out looking for McCain,” James said.
“Suits me,” Christie said, closing her workbox.
“You stay here and I’ll go look for him. If he’s selling them things, I’m going to put a stop to it.”
After reassuring himself again that the trunk was safe, he left. He went in the direction of the public square, where some traders had congregated. Christie put away her workbox, and after visiting the outhouse she wandered off in the opposite direction, away from the businesses. James wouldn’t know. Maybe she would even run into Greenberry.
She walked for a few blocks, into an area that was dusty and poor, scattered with piles of bricks, probably from buildings that had been toppled in the War. She passed tarpaper shacks and burned-out foundations. A barrel on a corner signified a tavern. The smell of horse manure seemed to come in waves down the street. She was glad to be alone. Amanda’s letter gave her an uneasy feeling, for something unmentioned seemed to be disturbing her. Amanda had taken the fate of the babies to heart. Her grief seemed like an offering of friendship, Christie thought. Amanda would appreciate this trip so much more than James could. She would enjoy the privilege of being let loose from labor for a spell. Christie glanced down at her hands, which were softening in their idleness. It made her sad to think of Amanda scouring and washing, spoiling her fine, slender hands.
It was well over a year since they went to Reelfoot. Why did Amanda think it had been less than a year? Had she been as confused as Christie herself had been since that time? At Reelfoot, everybody believed the Lord was on His way, and then when the babies came, there seemed to be a connection. Thousands believed there was a significance to the wondrous births. But she had learned that her precious gift to the world actually meant very little to anyone but herself and James, and possibly Amanda. The audiences took pleasure from seeing her petrified babies, but they didn’t learn anything. Their interest in the babies would vanish as soon as they entered another tent and saw the hippopotamus or the similarly built fat-lady. They might remember her babies from time to time, vaguely, the way Christie remembered the lion roaring at the first circus she and James had attended together. But nobody would remember any significant particulars, such as the way Emily Sue’s hair curled. They wouldn’t realize what they had seen. Why hadn’t she understood this months ago, when all those people landed at her bedside like buzzards? She felt so innocent, as if she had had to learn every basic lesson of life the hard way, and by the long route. There had been no one to guide her, no precedents, nobody to look to except Brother Jones.
But Brother Jones wouldn’t recognize Jesus Himself, walking down the street with a halo on, she thought bitterly. For a man of the church, he had remarkably little vision about anything. She remembered a time when he preached from Deuteronomy and used it to forecast the tobacco crop. That had sounded questionable to her then, and now it struck her as absurd. For a long time, during her pregnancy, she had believed that the excitement Brother Cornett stirred up at Reelfoot had entered her so profoundly that the creatures inside her were like a manifestation of her sinful thoughts. And then when the babies were born, she knew her own mind had multiplied her hopes and fears. And afterward, she had listened to too many people try to make something out of the babies’ brief lives. It was just more babble from Reelfoot, she thought. Now her head seemed to be clearing, the babble fading to murmurs.
Christie turned down a boardwalk that paralleled the river. If she were to run into Greenberry with those baby-bed souvenirs, she would wrench them all from him and throw them from the bluff into the river. Gleefully, she pictured the surprise on his face, his features jumping around as if disconnected.
The boardwalk ended, and a dirt path continued past some small houses. She could feel the steaminess of the river, but she couldn’t yet see the water. Somewhere far ahead someone was singing. She strained to hear. The song was bursts of hollering, with a quieter refrain. It sounded like a Negro sundown holler—that long, loud collective sigh of relief she had been hearing every night when the field workers quit. But this voice seemed to echo and reverberate, and when it had surely died out, it started up again, a little louder, then louder still. Again it grew softer, repeating the pattern. The sound rose out of the trees the way a bird’s song would, although the notes resembled no bird’s song Christie had ever heard—except maybe that of the rain crow, or certain owls at night. Unafraid, she followed the sound into the woods, keeping to a narrow deer path. The hollering was strangely beautiful, reminding her of Mittens’ song. It wasn’t exactly the same melody, but it belonged in the same family—if music had families of sounds.
The vegetation was dying back, and walking was not difficult. Stickers clung to her dress. She watched for snakes. Eventually, she spotted the singer leaning against a tree, his back to her. He had on a straw hat and ragged blue clothing. She saw now that he had a guitar, and she could see his brown hands working the instrument. He had a bottle in his right hand, and he rubbed the bottleneck along the strings of the guitar to make the whining note she had heard; the guitar seemed to have a voice, answering his song. He was singing about a woman who lived alone, a large woman in a house by the cotton fields, where he worked. She was large and soft and dark as the river at night. The song didn’t have any regular rhyme or rhythm; he seemed to be making up the words as he went along, the way Mittens did. But Christie began to see the woman in the song, the mighty woman coming at night to warm him in his cold bed. The memory of her carried him through the day, working in the cotton fields to get his hundred. As he sang, the woman became the voice of the guitar, answering him, as if she were a spirit inside that bottle. He might have been leaning onto the tree for the strength to create the extraordinary sounds. It was as if the man’s mouth and windpipe were an instrument for emitting a feeling so deep down it was painful to let out. Christie crept backward. She hid behind a pecan tree and listened to the tortured song. It gave her a glow inside like an electrical bulb.
The song continued. The Negro sang about trying to find the woman in the daytime, for he was too weak to pick cotton and he needed her like medicine. He managed to stagger to her cabin, but no one was home. It seemed that no one had lived there for many years. Exhausted, he lay under a bush and waited for night to bring her back.
When the song ended, Christie stole away. Finding the path, she rushed out of the woods, propelled by a desire awakened in her by the music. Her heart beat fast. Something was moving in her, like the desire she felt when she first journeyed to Hopewell—a longing for something new and surprising. And she had felt it when she went down to Reelfoot—that desire swelling when she listened to Brother Cornett. And then her excessive desire seemed to manifest itself in her five babies. Then, losing them had shattered her desire. But now she felt as though her mind were gathering its scattered, aimless longings and rolling them together into one.
She remembered something Big Wiggins had said: “If you can sing a song, a body can see straight into your heart.” She felt that the singer in the woods had sung her song for her; in his song she had heard her own accumulated rage and sorrow, coming out in deep, clear notes. It was a song she thought would stick in her mind, repeating, the way Mittens’ song had. Already, it played through her head, as if it were reorganizing her memories, sharpening them and shaping them for some new purpose.
Quickly, she stooped to gather some pecans scattered across the walkway, and then she hurried back to Mrs. Cunningham’s, arriving just ahead of James.
“Did you find him?” she asked.
“No. I looked all around at the depot and the main street,” James said. “I saw some good horses, but the traders down here are slick as owl grease. I figured Gooseberry would be right there with them.”
He didn’t notice the stickers on her skirt, and she hid the hem she had torn on a greenbrier. James would be disturbed if he knew she followed a Negro man’s voice into the woods. And she didn’t know how to tell him the nature of the song she had heard. She could almost visualize that immense, dark woman coming to the singer at night, giving him the strength to get through the day’s labor.
Upstairs, Christie changed clothes. Mrs. Cunningham brought her some warm water and a dirty-looking towel. Mrs. Cunningham lingered, beaming still about Christie’s fame. “I’m so proud y’all stopped with me,” she said. “And I want you to be sure to come back again. Make Mr. McCain bring you back through our way.”
“We won’t be back,” Christie said, holding the dirty towel by one corner. Mrs. Cunningham’s admiration was of no significance to her. This scrawny landlady was nothing like the woman in the song.
Later, Christie and James waited downstairs with their baggage, but there was no sign of Greenberry. Mrs. Cunningham was setting the table for the noon meal.
“Are y’all eating with us?” she asked.
“When McCain gets here,” said James. “He’s paying.”
“Well, he must be coming back,” Mrs. Cunningham said. “He ain’t taken care of the bill yet.”
“What if he don’t come back?” said Christie.
“Well, I’m afraid I’d have to ask you fine folks to pay the bill.”
“We’ll just wait here till he turns up, ma’am,” said James.
Mrs. Cunningham darted into the kitchen, and James rammed his fist against the door, then cradled the pain. “He was supposed to pay us today,” he said. “If he don’t come back, we don’t even have enough money to get home. And I wouldn’t know how to find the way anyhow.”
“Now don’t get worked up, James,” said Christie calmly. “We can’t let him run our lives.”
She wished she could just get on the train and go to Memphis, or New Orleans, or anywhere by herself. She was still churned up by the song she had heard. She had never heard such an earnest cry from the heart.
“I expect Greenberry will come back,” Christie said to James. “He’s always going off somewhere.”
“I’ve been calculating how much he’s taking in,” James said, flexing his fingers. “All week, I’ve been counting the people. He stands there and wags his tongue, and I count the people in my head. Last night, he had about three hundred and fifty. And during the day, I estimate a thousand. He’s running ’em through like a dose of salts. And they paid twenty-five cents apiece. Say it was twelve hundred people. That’s close to three hundred dollars—ever day! Besides them souvenirs. You know he never throwed ’em away.” James shook his head and began pacing. “If Uncle Wad knew how this was going, he’d be fit to be tied.”
“Well, Greenberry’s paid us what he agreed to,” Christie said.
“He’s liable to sell them souvenirs by mail order. He could do that for years.” James lowered his head and said quietly, “We oughter knowed ever’body in the world would want to see the babies. We knowed that.” He squatted to tie his shoe.
He went out again, walking down the street. Christie took her sewing to the long verandah so she could see the mossy trees and the boogerville flowers. Several carriages pulled up, and a vegetable wagon. A man in a horse-drawn dray delivered some baggage from the depot. Greenberry had said the train was at one o’clock. Christie closed her eyes, trying to bring back every note of the song she had heard. She had to remember it.
At twelve, Mrs. Cunningham came out and asked her if she wanted some dinner.
“I can’t pay for it,” said Christie.
“I’ll put it on your bill, if you’re sure he’s coming back.”
“I reckon we’ll do without.”
Her stomach grumbled. Restlessly, she went inside and sat in the parlor. The dining room smelled inviting—ham and potatoes and gravy and green beans. The apple cobbler on the sideboard was bubbling hot. Even though James had complained about the breakfast, Mrs. Cunningham’s cooking was better than most of the food they had encountered in their travels. It was odd that Mrs. Cunningham was so impressed with who Christie was, yet wouldn’t give her a morsel to eat. The woman probably believed they were rich, Christie thought. She touched the five dollars hidden inside her waist. Stubbornly, she refused to take it out.
She saw James outside and went out to greet him on the verandah.
“Mrs. Cunningham offered us dinner,” she said when he walked up the steps. “But I said we couldn’t pay for it.”
“I’m ready to eat. Can’t we go ahead and eat?”
“Well, what if Greenberry don’t come? You were afraid he’d gone off.”
He began to clean mud from his shoes on a wrought-iron boot scraper at the top of the steps.
“James, you were right,” she said when he finished. “We oughtn’t to have sent all the money home to Wad. We might need to buy a train ticket.”
They went inside and waited. James watched out the window. At twenty to one, he said, “Here comes old Gooseberry.”
“Hello, folks!” said Greenberry with a large smile, as he shut the front door and removed his hat. “Are you good folks ready to go?”
“We’ve been waiting on you,” said James, scowling. “We didn’t know what you were up to.”
“I got tied up with some of my wife’s kinfolks. Talk, talk, talk,” he said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t get a word in to say I had to leave! They made me set down with them to eat. Lottie’s sister can cook like an angel—she had fried rabbit and chicken salad and wilted greens and corn and berry cobbler. I eat till I thought I’d bust. I guess y’all eat one of Mrs. Cunningham’s fine dinners.”
“No, we didn’t,” said Christie.
“Oh, that’s too bad. Well, let me settle this bill and we’ll have to get on out of here.” Greenberry patted his pocket and strode to the desk.
Christie and James glared at him. Mrs. Cunningham and Greenberry jabbered like old friends. Greenberry’s face was red. It glowed like foxfire.