They have gone now and except for the rain on the window and the rasping of Old Lady Simpson in the next bed it is still. I have ripped the white strip of tape from my arm and pulled out the needle and I find I can write without pain. The paper of pills I kept after Forrest was taken lies concealed under my pillow, where it will keep until I set down what I must. I have the rest of the night to do so.
I was born sixty-five years ago tomorrow morning, the twenty-first of March, in Upper Lord’s Hollow, the only girl of nine children, the youngest and the one my father cursed before birth with a man’s name, which first in disbelief and then in anger and at last in violent denial of my sex he refused to change. He chose me from all of his children to hate in particular, partly because I was a girl and not strong enough, he thought, to do a man’s work in the fields and partly because my mother died soon enough after my birth for him to blame me for his having to hire a neighbor girl to come in at a dollar a week to care for me and cook meals and clean the house until I was old enough to do those things myself.
From the early times I clearly remember four things. My name, Burl, a man’s name, bestowed upon me in wrath and spite, which I despised more than Satan. Mud season, which kept my father and brothers from traveling into the Common Saturday nights, holding them fast to the kitchen, where they swilled their own poison and cursed me for entertainment until they could no longer see me to curse. The hot afternoon in haying time in my twelfth year when I kicked my brother Warren between the legs, laying him up in bed for two weeks because he threatened me with the hayfork after I refused to turn over the milk check to him to squander on drink. And, finally, the February morning Forrest Gleason came down from his place, the last farm up the Hollow, and stood in our kitchen in his sheep coat and felt boots and offered my father a cord of wood and me two dollars a week to go with him and live in his house and care for his thirteen children now that his wife was dead. My father staggered to the window and looked out at his dwindled woodpile. “Take her and be damned,” he said.
I had nothing to take away with me but the cast-off men’s clothes I was wearing and the Bible that with some help from the hired girl I had learned to read from, which had been my daily consolation at a time when I did not know I needed a consolation because I considered my tribulations to be as natural and ordained as those of the exiled children of the Lord. I asked Forrest to wait in his cutter and when he had gone I stood in the open door with the Bible under my arm and said to my father and brothers, “I am going out of your door now and I will never come through it again. Nor do I expect you to come to mine, however old or sick or poor you become.” I looked at my father. “You cursed me the day I was born,” I said. “I leave that curse here in this house with you.”
And so when in later years first my father and then one by one my brothers appeared old and sick and penniless in fall’s rain or winter’s snow or summer’s heat my answer was always the same. “What you have sown, that shall you reap.” For that the Common named me a merciless woman, forgetting that He said, “Judge not.” So far from turning away old and homeless men I was saying no more than “Satan, get thee behind me” and doing no worse than scourging devils from the face of the earth. For devils they were, who christened me with a curse and baptized me with beatings, and it has been a comfort to me in hard times to think of them roasting on Satan’s spit in Hell.
When I first went to Forrest he was forty-one and I was fourteen. I cooked and washed and kept house for him and his children and was mother to all of them, including the five older than me. I brought them up to work hard and read the Bible and live upright and clean lives. When you hear tales about the wild Gleasons you may be certain it is not any I had a hand in raising.
When I could spare time from the house I worked beside Forrest in the fields. In the summer of my nineteenth year he looked up at me building the load on the hay wagon and proposed marriage.
“All right,” I said. We drove the team down the valley to the Common and were married in our overalls by the peace justice. After the ceremony we returned home and put the rest of the hay in the barn.
Our marriage, so far from satisfying the Common, only confirmed them in their belief that we had been dwelling together in sin, but we gave no thought to them, and had I known of their outrage at the time it would have been a source of pleasure to me. Forrest and I lived man and wife together for thirty years and I never regretted it once, though they were hard years and poor.
The hardest time was during Temperance. It was as if one of the wine gods of the fallen children had sprung up and said to us, “All right, since you have chosen dryness I will see that you get your fill of it,” and arranged for the longest and worst drought in the history of Kingdom County. I have since read that other parts of the land were worse afflicted, but that fact would have been little consolation to us at the time. Nothing would grow. The wells dried up, the crops dried up, the stock ponds dried up, and finally the cows dried up.
In the third year of the drought Clarence Kinneson, director of the bank, drove up the Hollow in his Ford, raising the dust all the way up the valley from the county road so that we could see his cloud for two miles and hear him for another mile before we could make out the car through the dust. Clarence stood in the dooryard talking to Forrest for a long time. The sun was hot and I took a pitcher of cold water out to them. Forrest tipped back his head and drank, but when he offered the pitcher Clarence was ashamed to take it. After he went Forrest came in the house and put his head down on the kitchen table and cried. As big a man as Forrest. So that even I, who had never been to school a day in my life, could see why Clarence had not taken the water.
The Common has never forgiven me for what I did to save the farm, which until that hot dusty day that Clarence drove up the valley in his Ford and Forrest cried I had not known was mortgaged, or what a mortgage was, for that matter. I never asked a single question but knew as well as I knew right from wrong what I must do. When Forrest returned to the fields I went straight to the milk house and got a metal milk can such as we used then before the bulk-tank law that put so many farmers out of business came in. I lugged the can down across the fields to the river, which, being spring fed, was still cold and full, and I selected a spot where the river flowed through the woods out of sight of the house and road. There I put to use the only knowledge I had ever learned from my father and brothers. With a sack of sugar, a few feet of copper tubing, and what little of Forrest’s corn that had survived the drought, I turned out my first moonshine whiskey. And all that summer and the next and the next, while other women up and down the Hollow preserved tomatoes and snap beans and jells, I put up twenty glass quart jars of whiskey every week. Ash, Forrest’s youngest, who had bought my father’s place for taxes after the old man had died delirious in the back of a car carrying him to the insane asylum, took it down to the Common every Saturday evening buried beneath a pile of feed sacks under the wagon seat, and sold it to Harry Chadburn and Dr. Alexander and Mr. Clarence Kinneson himself. I have been told that they found it excellent.
I ran some off several nights each week, walking down across the pasture under the moon and stars, building a small fire under the milk can with hardwood, and returning through the pasture with the dew shining off my boots just as the sun came over Hoar Mountain, striking silver off the lookout tower. By the time Forrest had finished with the milking I was back in the kitchen fixing breakfast so that he would not need to be constantly reminded of the way we were holding the farm.
I have never doubted the fact that it was the Common, and the women in particular, who set James onto me, though he never said and I never asked. One summer, in the second year of my venture, I looked up from the fire and he was there, big and sudden and quiet in his city clothes and shoes, standing watching me from just across the river where the copper tubing came up out of the cold water and ran into the kitchen kettle I was using to collect the distillation. I looked at him and he looked back at me and then I looked down at my fire again and could hear him come splashing across the river in his city shoes. “I didn’t know you would be a woman,” he said. “I’ve never arrested a woman.”
I stood up and looked in his eyes and although I was dressed in overalls I was not ashamed. Nor was I ashamed to be caught making moonshine. “All right,” I said. “Arrest me. But first I want you to know something. Up in the barn milking is a man I am married to that this will kill. He does not wear a necktie or even own one but he is worth one hundred of you.” I turned my head and spit on the ground by his wet shoes. But I was not spitting at James. Rather, though I did not know it at the time, I was spitting at the false righteousness of the women in the Common, who had sent him. I turned away to blink the water out of my eyes, water brought not because I had been caught and would have to go to jail but because Forrest would now lose the farm. When I turned back James was gone. I did not see him again for more than twenty years.
I made moonshine for five more summers. Then Temperance ended and so did the drought. We worked the land hard and put whatever we gained back into it again. We saw each one of the children married and settled and sent five of them on to state college, mortgaging the farm twice more. And the year we made the last payment on the last mortgage Forrest was told he had cancer. In the final months I milked and plowed and hayed by myself as I had done beside him for thirty years. It was a blessing when he was finally taken.
Why I kept the pain pills the doctor had given me to ease his last days I do not know, any more than I had known forty years earlier that learning to read by yourself was not the only way to learn to read. Any more than I knew eleven years after Forrest’s death how I was able to recognize the man who drove up the road, paved now, and turned into my dooryard as I was coming out of the milk house, that now held a shining bulk tank, so I could not have connected him in my mind with milk cans and recognized him that way. I simply knew him, that was all, as I presume I would know a picture of my mother. His wife had died the year before and he had gone to Florida, where he had been sick with being alone. Now he was standing in my dooryard.
“Have you come again to arrest me?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I have come to marry you.”
We were married that Saturday. The day before, I went to St. Johnsbury and bought $235 worth of women’s things, the first I had ever owned, and had my hair set. When I got home I burned my overalls and work shirts and barn boots, not because I was ashamed of them or of anything I had ever done in them but because I was through with them forever.
That was the happiest time of my life. I do not mean that James was a better man than Forrest. He was only a gentler man. He had been shot and stomped and knifed and nearly drowned by moonshiners, but that was only his job and he had kept his job separate from his life as Forrest had never done, as no farmer can do. That was the difference between them.
I sold the stock and machinery to Ash for a fair price and James and I spent the summer traveling. We traveled to the state of Maine and ate in restaurants and stopped overnight in motels. In August we visited Boston and James took me to see a baseball game and a stage play.
In the fall we had a central furnace and an inside toilet and a modern kitchen installed in the house. We hunted for partridge and deer and when winter came we bought a snow machine to ride. Every night we rode over the fields and the hills, taking turns driving, and always riding last to the top of the highest hill on the farm, where on a clear night we could look all the way down the valley to the cluster of lights that was the Common. This is my childhood that I missed, I thought. This is due me as it is due every person to have one childhood, and I did not feel frivolous or neglectful to play on the land I had worked for nearly fifty years.
It lasted eleven months. In March we went to Florida, where James died of a heart attack, departing as suddenly as he had come and leaving me so bitter that for weeks I wished I had never seen him. Then I saw, or thought I saw, that there was nothing more life could do to me because there was nothing more I cared for. I had James’s body flown back to Vermont and in April, when the ground thawed, I buried him beside Forrest, leaving a space between.
But the considerations of life will always betray us. Gradually the practical necessities of eating and sleeping and paying my bills replaced the hopelessness that some months before I would have sworn was as everlasting as God’s word. It was then that I realized that even despair was a vanity, as deceiving as hope.
My first clear feeling after that was hate. That, I have learned, can always be depended upon to convince us that life is worth living after all. Ash’s wife, who was born and raised in the Common, came up one afternoon and told me that there was talk that I was looking for a house there and that the women had come together to sign a paper against me, declaring that no person of loose character would be permitted to live in their town. Until then I had no intention of living in the Common. The next day I bought Harry Chadburn’s mother’s old place, across from the academy, and moved in, selling the farm to Ash. I lived in the Common for nearly four years, paying my taxes, keeping up my yard, and taking the greatest satisfaction in spiting the town that had scorned and despised and slandered me all my life.
I have little doubt and no regret that hatred was what finally destroyed my stomach and brought me here to this place, hatred being no substitute for the three meals a day I had given up since James’s death, living on coffee and cereal and hate alone until I could not keep down even the coffee and cereal because of the hate.
When Ash helped me through these doors last week I knew as well as I have ever known anything that I would never walk out of them again. I had no vision, no old woman’s artery-hardened revelation of myself stretched out in black, but a clear, abiding knowledge of the truth, the way things would be, such as passed before me when I stood in my father’s kitchen half a century ago and returned his curse, such as I had years later when I walked out of my barn and recognized James. Such as I have had throughout all of the years whenever I have picked up the Bible and read in it. It is a knowledge so strong that it is beyond any feelings or any premonition of good or evil. It is a knowledge as undeniable and irresistible as the sun rising in the morning and setting at night.
They could find nothing wrong with my stomach. They punched at it and jabbed needles into it and took pictures inside it and finally opened it up. But there was nothing there. I did not expect there would be. You cannot see hatred, any more than you can see a curse; any more than you can see a name. After the operation they put a needle from a bottle into my arm and stopped feeding me and sent in a doctor, who told me that the sickness was in my head.
“Go ahead and starve me,” I said. “It will be quicker and easier that way. But it is sinful to lie to a dying old woman.”
“I’m not lying, Grammy,” the doctor said.
“I’m not your grammy or anyone else’s,” I said. “Leave me, Antichrist. Leave me alone to die in peace.”
They would not, though, and at last I saw that my final curse was to be tortured with a lingering and useless life that I had never asked for to begin with.
“We will move you up to the third floor tomorrow, where you will be more comfortable,” they told me this morning. The third floor is the lunatic ward. No doubt that would delight the Common, but for once in my life I will have to disappoint them. This evening Ash brought me Forrest’s pills, and there is a glass of water on Old Lady Simpson’s bed table. I can keep down a liquid for half an hour, which will be sufficient time.
I am not ashamed of my life, nor am I sorry to leave it. I have lived hard and full with a father’s curse and a town’s contempt, both of which I returned with interest, both of which I now cast off forever as I once cast away my men’s clothes. What is left of James’s insurance will bury me, so that I will be a burden to no one. Ash will have the house in the Common to sell or keep as he chooses. He is a good boy and had no earthly idea why I wanted the pills and is no way at fault. That must be clear or I could never lie between Forrest and James in peace, and now, after sixty-five years, that is all in this world that I want.
Outside the window it is dawn. My sixty-fifth birthday. The last of the snow has been washed away and the hills are brown through the rain. It is mud season. God’s yearly reminder to us of the clay from which we rose and to which we must return, hill people and Commoners alike.