THE OLD HOUSE
The biddies at the store had my mind churning about Mama, who I hadn’t thunk of in quite a spell. She was never spoke of at home on account’a Daddy. We never knew what might rile him, and we tried right hard not to find out.
On the path towards home, the word Why? sounded in my head with ever’ step. Why did she leave? Why couldn’t I remember?
I stopped quick-like. I had passed the old fork that my feet used to know so well. Scurrying back, I took that old path and come over a rise to a house I thunk about sometimes, though I tried not to.
You might think Mama left on account’a she got tired of living the poor life like we done. But back when Mama left, we lived in this good-sized house on a patch of land with vegetable gardens enough to feed us hearty ever’ day of the year. We even had a mess of chickens and a pig. Back afore the Hard Times.
Raynelle could recollect when Granny and Granddaddy Cutler owned this house. Mama, Daddy, Pick, and her lived here with ’em. She said she was four years old when Granddaddy sold the house to Daddy, his only son. How on earth Raynelle could remember what happened when she was four bewildered me. I couldn’t even remember Mama.
I looked around at trees and brush. Last year’s dead leaves moldered amidst what was once a vegetable garden. Surely Mama had tended that garden, pulling weeds and planting new life into its soil.
I counted on my fingers the seven years Mama’d been gone. We’d still lived in this house for dang near six of them years, so of course I remembered the house. But Mama was an empty place in my mind.
I blew out my breath and meandered over to the garden shed. It no longer had a door. Sunlight shone through a hole in its roof onto its dirt floor, where weeds had taken root. Weeds was all that flourished in Harlan County anymore.
I walked right up to the house, scraped dirt off a windowpane, and peeked in. Other than a broken bedstead in the corner, the room was empty. A room me and my sisters had shared. Recollections of jokes and laughter with Raynelle in that room flitted through my mind, us talking about silly things and jabbering on and on about ever’thing. And nothing. Back on those rare days when she felt like my sister.
But it wasn’t our house no more, and it seemed we didn’t hardly laugh at all now. And Raynelle was more like a mama than a sister. But she wasn’t Mama. Mama was gone. Gone from Smoke Ridge. Gone from my memory.
I moved to the front porch, where a dusty For Sale or Rent sign leaned against the siding. I recalled a rocking chair that used to set here. Surely Mama had rocked in that chair, maybe with Blissie in her arms, but I couldn’t remember none of it. What was wrong with me?
I plunked down on the top step. Years of weather had grayed the steps considerable, and the house’s white paint had peeled like birch bark. But being there brought back a sense of the way things was afore Hard Times wore us down like the dirt road into Smoke Ridge.
Daddy always said that ever’body in Harlan County lived a “hand-to-mouth life.” But in the past year or so, our hands become emptier and the distance to our mouths seemed longer.
I truly hated being poor. It didn’t make sense that we lived crammed in a tiny box of a shanty when nobody lived in this big house. I jumped up and give the For Sale or Rent sign a sturdy kick, and heard the tinkle of broken glass. Behind the sign, I found three empty Mason jars with lids, one of them now busted into five large pieces.
I picked up a busted piece with the lid still attached, avoiding a jagged shard of glass sticking out like a giant’s tooth. Not one speck of dust or dirt tainted that glass.
I took a sniff and the reason flew right up my nose and into my head. I couldn’t have lived with Daddy all these years and not known that smell. Moonshine!
Seemed like our old house had become a drop place for a moonshiner and his customer. And moonshiners could be nasty-tempered folks.
The wind picked up, causing a dogwood’s leaves to shudder. A rustling sound come from the hemlock grove beyond the vegetable garden. A moonshiner? With a shotgun? A chill shivered down the back of my dress. I dropped the busted jar and scampered back to the fork and took the trail towards home, thoughts of Mama scared clean out’a my head.