For five more years the Twelve-Mile Straight lay flat and trim as a yardstick between the town and the pines. More tractors came across it. Some mules still came across it. Some mules left in trucks. The chain gang kept its ditches clear. Along it grew rabbit tobacco and wiregrass and black-eyed Susan. Groundhogs and gopher tortoises lived along it and sometimes tried to cross. One moonless night in 1933, just east of String Wilson Road, a Dodge Victory Six veered to miss a wild boar standing in the middle of the Straight and ended up in the creek. The driver broke his collarbone. For weeks folks talked about it at the crossroads store. For a long while nothing else of note happened along that stretch of road.
But when the twins were going on six years old, the weather in Georgia began to change. The whole of their lives had aligned with the greatest drought to touch that region in a hundred years, so that they knew nothing but rain-starved fields and cotton leaves that crumbled to dust between their fingers. To keep the soil from getting gullied and rilled, the state paid them eight dollars to plant an acre of kudzu, but what the kudzu did was bring rain. The vines grew wet and green where the sorghum had been the season before, and it climbed the gourd tree as tall as the twins. They made a tent of it, and capes; they fancied the gourd tree their beanstalk. When the thunderstorms came, the twins stripped naked and played in the mud puddles in the yard, and their mothers let them. In one of the storms, a bolt of lightning struck the gourd tree, blasting the top cross into splinters, rattling most of the gourds to the ground. Later the twins collected them and set them under the porch, and they found that all manner of animals liked to nest there, not just birds but squirrels and field mice and lizards, and once a pine snake they named Ugly. The kudzu grew even there, under the porch. If they let it, Winna’s momma said, it might cover the whole farm, it might grow right over the house, and Winna’s momma said she might let it.
But soon the gourd tree wasn’t so tall. Trucks brought telephone poles and raised them up along the road. They strung up electric lines, and the purple martins found them to be a fine place to roost. The whiskey still had been abandoned shortly after George Wilson died, and when Georgia finally went wet in 1935, long after most other states did, no one even went out there to drink in their trucks. The county camp out west of town packed up and moved its tents, but the road had already been paved. The land was level, the soil was rich, rich enough that they built a new community out there, not on George Wilson’s dollar but on Washington’s.
Soon it wouldn’t be the Twelve-Mile Straight any longer. When Cotton Acres was finished, they would extend the Straight to the state road, and the chain gang would pave it. It wouldn’t be far from there to Albany, Macon, Atlanta. Some would still call it the Twelve-Mile Straight, or Twelve-Mile Road, or Twelve-Mile Pass, now that it passed through to someplace else. Some would call it the crossroad, or the number the state gave it. The twins would no longer be young when the county renamed it Genus Jackson Road. In later years, most folks shortened it to Jackson.
Before that, in the days before Winna left the farm for Cotton Acres, that spring she was going on six, her daddy tried to talk up their leaving. The sow had just farrowed and Winna had spent the morning playing with the piglets, saying good-bye to them one by one. She’d given each of them a name, but she got them mixed up. Her dress was dirty with them, but her daddy parked his wheelchair on the front porch and patted his lap and Winna climbed onto it. He put on his radio voice. Did she know what a utopia was? It was a community where folks homesteaded together, cooperated, grew crops, lived happy lives. Did she know what homesteading was? It was building a new home. It was lighting out for new territory. He pointed west down the road, in the direction of the pines. It was starting over. It was sharing.
Like sharecroppers? Winna asked.
No. Real sharing.
He told her about the president, whose voice she knew from the radio, whom he had known when he was governor of New York, who had chosen to build one of the farm projects in Cotton County. He told her about the governor of Georgia, who was gunning to be president himself, who didn’t want help from outsiders, didn’t want a handout.
Why not? Winna asked him.
Her father thought about it. Because he’s proud, he said.
But Cotton Acres would have its own school, a pool she could swim in. A cotton gin. And he would have his own clinic. Wasn’t that wonderful? Weren’t they lucky? He wouldn’t have to travel the countryside anymore, or pretend he knew how to plow a field. It was all too hard on his legs. He would leave that work to others. Now that Aunt Nan had a car—when Parthenia Wilson died, she’d left Uncle Frank the Buick—she was traveling as far as Valdosta to deliver babies.
Momma says she don’t want ladies telling her what to plant and how, Winna said. And she don’t want to have to wear shoes in the yard.
Her daddy laughed. You won’t have to wear shoes in the yard, he said.
Winna could see herself in her father’s glasses. She knew he wasn’t her real father, but she loved him like one. Winna’s real daddy was a bad man who had been killed by her granddaddy, who had good and bad in him. That was why her granddaddy was in Milledgeville. He had a bullet in his spine that made his legs frozen like her father’s and another in his neck that made his mouth frozen like Aunt Nan’s. That was because her great-granddaddy was a bad shot. (Or good, some folks said, depending.) Her granddaddy was in a wheelchair too. Winna had visited him twice. He drooled and moaned but he could hug her. Her momma didn’t know how much he could understand, even how much he could see. He should have been in jail but the judge said jail wasn’t the place for him because he was crippled, so he sent him to Milledgeville instead. But now he’d been there five years and even the sanitarium wouldn’t keep him. He was being sent home. Her momma had agreed to take care of him. That was why they were moving to Cotton Acres.
How come he can’t come back to the farm? Winna wanted to know.
Her father smoothed her hair with his hand. Because he doesn’t belong here anymore, Winna Jean Bean. There ain’t room for all of us. Specially with Nan and Frank’s baby on the way.
Well, why can’t they come with us?
Her father gave her the kind of smile that meant he was buying time to think. Because they belong here, Bean.
What about the piglets?
They belong here too.
Momma says it’s her job to look at her daddy’s face every day.
Her daddy stopped smiling. His face looked stern, then sad. He said, I suppose she thinks it is.
* * *
They would be leaving the first of May, and Winna wanted a May Day party. It was her idea to use the gourd tree as the maypole. What did they need it for anymore, now that the gourds had fallen?
Her mother and Nan stood over bowls in the kitchen. Her mother looked at Nan and then at Winna. I don’t think that’s a good idea, she said.
Why not? said Winna. We’re gone pretty it up. We can have watermelon and lemonade and fried chicken. She told all the people they’d invite: Lucy Cousins and her brothers and sisters, Al and Cecilia and their grandchildren, Uncle Quincy from Macon.
Her momma said, I don’t know about all that.
But Nan gave her momma a look that said: Let her.
So at the five and dime in town, Elma bought spools of ribbon, yellow and green and blue and pink. Nan made a wreath of catalpa pods, and together they sewed the ends of the streamers to it. It took an hour to ax the kudzu vine from the base of the gourd tree, and to clear a circle big enough to walk around it. Then Sterling held the ladder and Frank shimmied up it and placed the wreath over the top like a crown.
There were all the things Winna wanted. Women brought hard-boiled eggs and biscuits and chicken legs. Men brought their instruments and flasks of corn liquor. Sterling showed the children how to throw horseshoes, and Oliver gave them rides in his wheelchair. There were the field hands and the neighbors, Aunt Mag and her man and her daughter, her daddy’s country patients, babies he or Nan or both had delivered. (The families who were not pleased to be left with Negro neighbors, the undeserving heirs of a fickle benefactor, did not accept the invitation. They had made their opinion known. The twins’ first birthday, Sterling opened the mailbox where he’d once left a bouquet of blue hound’s tongue to find that it was packed with cow flap.)
But the first day of May, a Friday, Frank led the fiddling band in “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” as the children took up their streamers and danced around the maypole, Winna chasing Wilson, Wilson looking over his shoulder, laughing, their bare feet kicking up dust, their arms raised above their heads, circling till they were dizzy. When they’d run out of streamers, Elma helped pin them to the foot of the pole. Then all the children collapsed in the yard to see the braid they’d made of the gourd tree. It stood with its crooked cross and one dangling gourd, its trunk wrapped in ribbons.
Nan stood a ways off, watching. She cocked her head. Something was wrong. It looked like a scarecrow dressed in Sunday clothes. What if she just loosened it a bit? And a bit more? She saw the ax lying in the dirt, clean and ready.
* * *
It’s time, Wilson’s papaw said after the cars had gone. He found Wilson in the barn, talking to the mules.
I know, Wilson said.
You say good-bye to them pigs?
Yeah, he said.
All right, bud. I’m gone need your help. You got to be brave, hear?
Papaw?
Yeah?
We got to do it? How come we can’t keep em?
His papaw came over and swung Wilson up onto Clarence’s bare back. It was Wilson’s favorite thing, to be taller than his grandfather. He liked to take his hat and play cowboy, but he didn’t do it now. His papaw did it for him, taking off the corn-shuck hat and resting it on his head. He looked up at him.
There’s too many of them, Sterling said.
But you said they good eating.
Government say we got to. Everybody’s got to. Won’t no one buy ten grown pigs from us this year.
We can take care of em.
It don’t make sense, I know. Times are getting better. That’s the price we pay, I reckon. But ain’t feel right to have so much for once and do away with it.
The barn was darkening into shadow, the late-day sun slicing through the cracks in the roof. Already the farm seemed quiet, emptied. Sterling remembered the day many years ago when he’d roamed this farm in a fever, looking for some ghost he couldn’t name who might take something from him. For a long time, he’d had so little that he’d been afraid of losing it. Now he smoothed his hand over Clarence’s snout and gave Wilson’s bare ankle a jiggle. All he’d lost, all they’d lost, and still: look at what they had. Too much, too much.
We gone do some work on this farm, Wilson. You and Frank and me.
Yessir, Wilson said. He knew Frank wasn’t his real father but he loved him like one. He made his mother laugh and shake her head and make a face that said: Don’t you dare. He was teaching her to play the fiddle and she was teaching him to cook. Sometimes, after a good meal, he would push back his chair, fall to the floor, and say he’d died and gone through the gates of Heaven.
We gone work it right into shape, his papaw said. But first—
I know. First I got to go to school.
That’s right. But first—
He stopped.
We got to do it now?
He helped Wilson down from the mule.
Tell you what, Sterling said. I got it. You go on.
So many things he wanted the boy to learn, so many ways he wanted him to be ready for the world. But there was time yet for him to learn this one.
I can do it, Wilson said. I can be brave.
I know you can, bud.
Wilson started to take off Sterling’s hat and return it to him, but Sterling said, Keep it. It’s yours.
Then he said, Go help your momma instead.
When he’d disappeared into the woods, Sterling gathered up all but two of the piglets. He didn’t think too much about which ones to leave, just grabbed the ones who didn’t squirm away. Some of them were still suckling when he pulled them off and put them in the zinc tub, and the momma was squealing. He carried the tub down to the creek. It was Lizard Creek, and before that it was Creek Creek, and before that it was Muskogee Creek, and before that it was water passing over rocks.
He was aware of each of his steps. He was aware of the feeling that he couldn’t get out from under God’s eye. It was the feeling he’d had when he’d gone hunting with George Wilson, that there was some evil calling him. This time he didn’t see a way out of it. If he had to sacrifice something, he could think of nothing so innocent, so precious, as a pig. The pines were thick and nobody else saw him as he eased down the bank, rested the tub in the stony creek bed, and one by one, held the animals under the water.
* * *
When her mother had died, years ago now, it was spring. All the joy the winds brought, the peach blossoms angling to be adored—she hadn’t wanted any of it. She had wrapped her feet in the winter’s newspaper so she might not feel the warm divine blades of grass. She had sat on the porch with a basket of field peas between her knees, not looking up to see what bird was calling.
Now it was spring again and she sat in the same rocker. The gourd tree stood before her, gagged with streamers. In her lap, wedged against her belly, was her mother’s coffee tin of white clay. From time to time she fed herself a cake of it. She wasn’t quite twenty but deep in her bones was the dread of the seasons. She did not like them to change. She did not like what they asked of her. She did not like to say good-bye.
Good-bye! Wilson had called from the porch, watching the cars back out of the drive. Frank had followed the Plymouth in the Buick to help carry the last of their things.
Good-bye! they’d all called back. Oliver blew the horn. Even Winna’s little dark-skinned doll waved. Elma blew a kiss out the window, and then pulled the pins from her hair so it fell in a wing over her face. Nan had taken off her own head rag and wiped her eyes with it.
Good-bye!
Good-bye!
Good-bye!
They’d be six miles down the road, she told herself, and yet she felt as though she and Elma had just been torn from the same warm body. It was all this birth she was grieving, because birth was a death of what had come before.
All the joy of spring, all the new life, and now her father was drowning God’s pigs in the creek. Too much innocence, too much beauty—it was as unbearable as hate. She thought of her mother’s knife, of her tongue buried out there under the gourd tree, and for a dizzy moment she understood it: that when you had been harmed, there were times you had to harm those you loved, so you could bear your love for them. That their innocence—that was what was unbearable.
She sat and she rocked. She sat with it for a while, her love and grief and forgiveness.
Then Wilson came up from the pines and across the yard and up the porch steps. She gave him a questioning look.
Just in the barn, he said. Papaw said come help.
No. She pointed to his hat.
Oh. Papaw gave it to me.
She closed the coffee tin and placed it on the floor and slapped her empty lap. He had to sit sideways on her knees, so big were they both getting. There were leaves crumbled on the back of his overalls. She brushed them off and rubbed his back and he let her. With his dirty little hands he polished the egg of her belly. She stroked the silky edge of the corn-shuck hat. Soon, when he learned to read, she would tell him about it.
For now, they had work to do and an hour of daylight. She tapped his back and he hopped off her lap and followed her to the yard.
You wanted to get them streamers down, Frank would say when he got home and for a long time after, you could have waited for me to get the ladder.
There was no more waiting. They had made the wretched thing beautiful. For a few hours, it was innocent again. She’d thought that might be enough, but even its beauty was unbearable. Now it was time to bring it down.
They took turns with the ax. Nan showed her son how to start, how to make a knee-high notch on one side, so it would fall away from the house. She showed him how to swing the ax, to put his shoulder into it, to aim low. The ax was heavy, and Wilson was proud. They turned and made a notch on the other side. The pole creaked in the breeze. They chipped at it, and rested, and watched the sun go down. Nan returned to the first notch, gave it one more swing, and looked up to see the last gourd shuddering. A lone purple martin leaped from it, dipped down over the yard, and went for the treetops.
When the gourd tree finally came down, it fell slow and regretful. It shook the ground beneath their feet. The birds fluttered in the trees. Down at the creek, Sterling felt it.
What was left was a stump, like the stub of a tongue. In time it was grown over. The gourd tree was good yellow pine, and they built two little mule-ear chairs from it, child’s size, and they put them on the front porch. The wreath of colored streamers they hung from the porch too, the ribbons reaching almost to the ground, on some days lifting loose in the wind. From either direction, coming down the road, it was the first sign you’d see of the farm.