Chapter Five
The incident.
I was seventeen.
A man from Winston-Salem by the name of Tom Fellows came to town to sell farming equipment. After renting a room at Carmichael’s
boardinghouse, he gave demonstrations to local landowners. Easygoing and persuasive, he charmed Papa sufficiently to get himself
invited to join the family for an early supper.
Mama was in bed with a nervous headache, as she often was, and Addie was visiting a friend in Wilkesboro for two nights. It
was just Papa and me and this smooth-talking blond-haired man. He asked questions and waited for the answers with a ready
laugh and an uncanny ability to parse what I was thinking.
When Papa left the room to find his pipe, this man’s eyes pinned me like a butterfly to a board, lingering on the curves beneath
my dress, the swell of my bodice. He reached over and touched the skin on the inside of my wrist. It was so improper that
I felt lightheaded, soaked in mortification. And something else: a deep, primal stir.
He said nothing, just looked into my eyes.
I met his gaze and held it.
I’d only ever felt this way once before: at thirteen, when I wrote a boy’s name over and over in my notebook—shaggy-haired
Harry Mooney, who was four years older and oblivious to me.
Harry Mooney, Harry Mooney.
Harry Mooney, who ended up yoking himself to one of the sour Blackstone girls and already seemed, at twenty-one, practically middle-aged.
Tom Fellows’s attention was the errant spark that turned the dry wood of my life to kindling.
When Papa came back into the room, Fellows remarked that it would be nice to take a constitutional after supper—get a bit
of air, stretch the legs. He’d like to see the wheat fields, and might he take a gander at the thresher in the barn?
Mama or Addie might have noticed the change in the air. Papa, several bourbons in, did not. “Certainly,” he said.
“And might I ask Miss Yates to do me the honor of showing me around?”
Papa smiled. “I don’t see why not if Sallie agrees. Anyhow, I have some paperwork to finish.”
“Do you agree, Miss Yates?” Fellows inclined his head toward me in an exaggeratedly courtly manner.
“I can,” I said stupidly, face aflame. “I—I mean, I do.”
When, several weeks later, Tom Fellows’s wife came to the house, screaming and cursing and calling me all kinds of names,
accusing me of unspeakable things, nobody believed her.
Until, that is, my belly began to swell.
It was, of course, a scandal. Papa was outraged, Mama inconsolable, Addie at first disbelieving, then horrified.
A small cloud already hung over the family. Several years earlier, my brother, Alston, had been snared in his own transgression,
impregnating a local married woman. Papa had to sign a $200 bond to guarantee support for his bastard child.
But my situation, everyone agreed, was far worse.
I’d barely understood what Tom Fellows was doing, but undoubtedly it was the result of my own moral frailty. I was marked by sin and doomed to bear the burden.
I was sent to stay with my childless aunt, Joan, my mother’s younger sister, a five-hour buggy ride away in a neighboring
county. I didn’t know Joan, but over the years I’d heard plenty of stories about her: how, even in a family of eccentrics,
as Papa said about Mama’s people, Joan was peculiar. She’d refused to marry, didn’t go to church, and aired her intemperate
ideas to anyone who would listen. She lived alone in a run-down cabin at the edge of a forest, without even a local man to
do chores and help her plant and tend her animals.
She and Mama had long been estranged, ever since Mama married and left home when Joan was fourteen. Her name became a silence
in our house. Once I overheard Mama say Joan had “chosen a path that decent folks couldn’t abide,” and when Papa asked if
they’d ever reconcile, Mama replied, “Not while she insists on living that way.” But packing me off to stay with her, away
from prying eyes and whispers, was the only option my parents could think of.
When we arrived at the cabin, Papa walked up the old porch steps and knocked on the door. It smelled of pine and damp earth.
Honeysuckle vines drooped in heavy masses from the low-eaved porch with well-worn rocking chairs and a small iron table. A
desiccated hornet’s nest hung from the rafters.
No answer.
Papa turned the knob and peered inside. “Well, she still lives here,” he said. “Or someone does.”
Gesturing for me to follow, he loped around the side of the house.
There, beside a lean-to, we encountered a flush-faced woman holding a small axe in one hand and a flapping, headless chicken in another.
Her apron was smeared with blood. She had long copper hair tied back with a piece of string and wore scuffed men’s boots beneath a plain cotton dress.
“Joan. You haven’t changed,” Papa said.
“David,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
“It has. Sallie, say hello to your aunt,” he said to me, motioning with his chin.
“Hello,” I said.
Joan gave me a nod. The chicken’s body had gone limp. She set it on a stump along with the axe and wiped her hands on her
apron. “What brings you to these parts?”
“Well, this one—Sallie—needs a few months to rest,” Papa said. “I’m sure you can find ways to keep her busy.”
With a skeptical frown, Joan said, “She needs to rest, and you want me to keep her busy?”
“She’s not infirm.”
Joan gave him a questioning look.
He shrugged.
I saw understanding dawn. “I see. Come on inside, then. You’ll stay for supper, David?”
Papa shook his head. “Dark soon. I’ll be getting back.”
“Please yourself.” She squinted at me. “You’re a little pale. Feeling poorly?”
I was nauseated after the bumpy ride, and my back ached, but it wasn’t polite to say so. “I’m all right, ma’am, thank you.”
“No ma’am here and no thank-yous.” Joan lifted the headless bird by the feet and turned toward the cabin, dripping blood in
the grass. “This way.”
Inside, the air was smoky and dank. I had to squint to see the rough wood table and a few mismatched chairs, a faded horsehair sofa, several oil lamps.
After dropping the bird on the table, Joan opened the door to show me her cluttered bedroom before leading me into a smaller room stacked with crates and boxes.
Heaps of clothing and blankets covered a narrow, rusted bed frame.
“You’re my first houseguest in quite a while.
If you can find the bed under all of that. ”
I gaped at her. She meant for me to sleep here?
Joan snorted. “I was not expecting company.”
I blushed. “I—I know. I’m sorry.”
“No sorry neither,” she said. “You’re probably hungry. Let’s pluck that bird and make us some supper.”
Joan seemed happy enough to have a girl in the house to milk the cow and sweep the floors, collect the eggs, make biscuits,
pluck dead chickens. I was a spoiled child and had never been expected to do these kinds of chores, but I took them on gamely
as a form of penance.
At home, if I felt like it, I sometimes helped with the canning, or quilt making, or pie baking, knowing that if I didn’t,
someone else would. No one relied on me. But here my toil made a difference. If I didn’t get out of bed before dawn to light
the fire, the cabin was cold. If I didn’t collect eggs for breakfast, I didn’t eat.
In the mornings, Joan sent me out to tend the goats—two nimble-footed nannies named Clover and Bramble. I filled their trough
with fresh water, mucked out the pen, gathered armfuls of blackberry bramble to scatter in the yard. At first the goats were
quick and suspicious, dodging away when I tried to corner them in their pen, but soon enough they got used to me. I felt a
great satisfaction the first time their warm, frothy milk hissed into my pail.
Joan laughed when I brought her the sloshing bucket, my skirts splattered with mud. “You’ll learn,” she said. “Keep your knees
tight against their ribs. And don’t be afraid to swat them if they kick.”
After a few days, I began taking on tasks that Joan had long ignored.
I scrubbed the cast-iron cookstove and shined it with wax, washed the windows with rags and soapy water, cleaned out the lean-to.
I found a cluster of herbs in the overgrown garden and set myself to the tasks of pickling cucumbers with dill and adding rosemary to stews and thyme to bread dough, as I’d watched Dinah, Mama’s house slave, do on our property, her hands deft and sure.
Joan taught me how to make potions and poultices—to crush calendula into a balm for irritated skin, to mix lavender with oil
to ward off headaches and sew it into sachets to tuck into pockets and dresser drawers.
Once my nausea passed, the days settled into an easy pattern. I rose early, worked with my hands, rested when I needed to.
I was surprised to discover that I liked having responsibilities; they gave me purpose for the first time in my life. It was
deeply satisfying to see the results of my labor—a warm pie cooling on the porch rail, the gleam of a polished stove, the
contented bleat of the goats as they chewed their bramble. Each task had a beginning and an end, tangible proof I’d done something
worthwhile.
As my body changed—my breasts tender, my ankles often swollen by dusk—Joan asked few questions and made no judgments. She
didn’t flinch at the sight of me. I was glad to be tucked away in the woods, far from curious glances and whispered speculation.
Joan made bourbon out of corn mash and rye. She kept a battered fiddle propped by the front door. In the honeysuckle-scented
dusk of early evening, as lightning bugs blinked in the grass, we sat on the porch sipping bourbon from chipped mugs. She
played her fiddle and sang ballads full of heartache.
The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,
and neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two,
and both shall row, my love and I.
A ship there is and she sails the sea,
She’s loaded deep, as deep can be.
But not so deep as the love I’m in,
I know not if I sink or swim . . .
The songs stirred feelings I’d never put to words, not even in the stillness of my thoughts. It wasn’t quite loneliness I
felt, but a yearning. For what, I wasn’t sure. A closeness without conditions, maybe. A kind of love that didn’t cost.
My own brief experience had brought only shame and exile.
Gazing at the black fringe of trees against a darkening sky, Joan told me about her life—how she never saw eye to eye with
her parents and left home at nineteen. How she claimed this patch of woods and cleared it herself. How a woman named Myrtle
Gibbs, a friend her family never knew about, came to join her. Together, they built the cabin, a shed for the cow, a pen for
the chickens, and tilled a garden.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Ah, Myrtle.” Joan took a sip of bourbon. “One afternoon she was stacking the woodpile and got bit by a timber rattler. Died
two days later, after a lot of suffering. I buried her yonder, behind the shed. Carved a headstone out of red oak.”
I looked out at the long, low, west-tilting cowshed. “I’m sorry, Aunt Joan.”
“It’s all right. It was some time ago.” She nodded toward a tall shrub in the yard. “I planted that to remember her.”
The shrub had bright purple flowers and bark as smooth as the legs of a horse. The last of the light glinted off its leaves.
“My family knows nothing about me,” Joan said.
“They thought your mama was destined to be a spinster and I’d be the one to marry and settle down.
I told them I wasn’t the marrying kind, but they refused to hear it.
” She lifted the fiddle again and tucked it under her chin.
“People decide who they want you to be, and they’re disappointed when you stay who you are.
I haven’t changed. I’m just doing what I want now, is all.
” She held the bow poised above the strings.
“We only get one life, unless you count heaven, and I don’t.
I didn’t want to get to the end of mine and wish I’d lived different. ”