Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You Page 16

  “What has Ginger Summerell got against men?” I asked.

  He resettled himself, then leaned back and crossed his legs. He was wearing thick white wool socks; I was wearing blue cotton ones. Our mucky shoes were out on the back porch, lying where we had flung them off when the morning chores at the barns were finished. In winter we changed to street shoes as soon as we came indoors, but the warm summer invited stocking feet. On Sundays, however, my mother insisted that we wear shoes to breakfast and my father teased her about this rule even more persistently than about some of her other mysterious regulations. “I thought Jesus and the apostles went barefoot,” he would tell her. “I don’t see why I can’t come to the table the way Saint Peter did.” She explained that as soon as he achieved sainthood he could come to the table in any getup he chose; he could wear a fireman’s hat and a blue velvet ballgown, she said, and added that she felt safe in giving him such wide latitude because his canonization did not appear imminent.

  He returned to my question. “I don’t know all the details,” he said. “But the men seem to come out of any intimate situation with Ginger looking all ragged and chewed-up.” He began to roll a cigarette, sifting out the delicate tobacco grains, spreading them along the furrow of the fragile paper, then closing the tube with a twirl of his fingers. He licked the edge and smoothed it out and held the cigarette up to admire. It was fat in the middle and wizened at the ends. “It’s the truth, Cora, you can’t deny that.”

  “I won’t deny that she’s got a lot of spirit,” my mother said, “and I won’t say that she might not be a handful and more for a lot of men. But, Jess, not all the males in the world are as fainthearted as your father seems to be this morning.”

  “Not fainthearted, never fainthearted—just prudent. Joe Robert Kirkman is noted far and wide for his cautious prudence. Ask around and you’ll see. And I judge it more prudent to go over Niagara Falls in a brown paper lunch bag than to marry up with Ginger Summerell. She is the feistiest woman I ever heard of, that I ever heard that anybody else ever heard of.”

  “What makes her so feisty?” I asked.

  “Being of the downtrodden masculine gender, I’m not sure I’ve got a proper answer,” my father said. “Cora, you’re going to have to be the one to explain to Jess what we are talking about.” He grinned through his blue-gray cigarette smoke, flashing the gold cap of his front tooth at her.

  “Oh I am, am I,” she said, her tone implying she was not charmed by the proposition, and I figured I’d never hear the story. Then she relented: “Well, maybe I will tell him one of these days. Better for Jess to get it from me than listen to some wild tale you’d dream up.”

  “Why, Cora,” he said, “I’m shocked that you’d say such a thing. Flabbergasted. Wounded. Nonplussed. Amazed, astounded, and astonished. Utterly and completely bumflustered.”

  “Yes,” she said solemnly, “I think I’d better be the one to tell him.”

  And a week later she did.

  * * *

  “The reason she’s that kind of person is where Ginger Summerell came from in the first place,” my mother said. “That’s one of the reasons at least. Marsden County is about a hundred years behind the rest of the world, and Bailey Ridge, where Ginger was born, is a hundred years behind Marsden County. It wasn’t long ago that they followed the old ways there. Maybe they still do, but when I was a girl, people talked about that place almost in whispers. You know how folks will go on about how they like old-timey notions and fashions and how the modern-day methods of doing things are hurrying us all to perdition.… Well, they didn’t say that about Bailey Ridge. It was too close to the way the frontier really used to be, I expect. Backward: That was the word they used till it became proverbial. You’d hear somebody say of another person, ‘Why, she’s as backward as Bailey Ridge,’ and you’d know what was meant.

  “And of course it was a place a lot harder for girls than for boys to grow up in. That’s always the case when you’re talking backward. It wasn’t the custom there to court a girl. They never heard of a nosegay or sweet talk or gentle manners. The boys—or older men, most likely—would try to find a girl somewhere alone in the woods or fields and make her pregnant. They called it ‘bigging’ a woman. If a man could ‘big’ a woman, then she’d belong to that man as a wife because she would be carrying his child. Those dreadful men took a lot of pride in it, too, just like hunters that bring down a ten-point buck or a fisherman showing off a hefty brown trout. They thought they had done something fine and praiseworthy, but it was nothing but rape, pure and simple.”

  She paused for a moment and took her hands out of the dishwater and leaned forward, looking with burning eyes into the sunny yard, where Sherlock and Quadrille, our best barn cats, lay, taking up the August heat like they were storing it for a long winter to come.

  “I hate that word, to big a woman,” she said. “It’s the ugliest sound in the world. I’m used to the common four-letter words. Children chalk them on the walls at the schoolhouse all the time, just to show their friends they can be naughty. But big is different. I’m glad that it has passed from the vocabulary. You probably never even heard it used the old backward way.”

  I shook my head to say no and finished drying the salad plate I’d been rubbing on, then stacked it with the others on the cabinet top. Aunt Thelma’s cousin Hannah had come in from Washington State for a visit and my mother had invited some lady friends in for tea to meet this woman who was reputed to have beautiful hands. She was a model for the movies, in fact, and often flew from Spokane down to Hollywood, where they would costume her and put her in a scene and spend all day filming her hands dealing cards or writing a letter or holding a man’s shoulder. Then the next day she would fly back home. This occupation made her seem exotic and important to us. All my mother’s friends wanted to meet her and enjoy an interview with her celebrated appendages. So my mother was giving a tea party. There was nothing like a dainty teacup to set off a lady’s hands, she told me, and she doubted that she would come by a better opportunity to display her gilt-rim Limoges. Not until that fateful day that I got married anyhow, and I decided that if she mentioned one more time “that cute little Sarah Robinson I was sweet on,” I would go out to the woodshed and get the ax and come back and chop her head off.

  “But Ginger Summerell was not going to fall prey to that old custom,” my mother said. “As soon as she was of an age, she understood that if she got herself bigged, then she’d be for the rest of her life the hand servant—and we might as well say slave and beast of burden—to some old man she would hate from the start. So she determined not to let it happen. And Ginger has the willpower it takes to carry out her plans and the wit to draw them up tight and sound.

  “She had the results right before her eyes, you see. You take notice, Jess, the next time we’re in Marsden County, how the women over there look. By the time they’re twenty-five years old, they look like they’re going on forty, and if they reach the ripe old age of forty, they look seventy-five. But it’s more likely they’ll have been worn out and pitched into stony graves by that time. I know life is hard back in those flint-rock hills and hollers, but it could be a lot easier if the menfolk would only let it be.… Of course, that’s not their idea about things. They read in the Bible that life is hard, so they set out to make it harder. That’s not what my Bible says to do, and I suppose your father might be right on that one little point—that we all read a different Bible.”

  I remembered my father’s saying, but I recalled the rest of it, too, the part she had left out. “All these homemade religionists read a different Bible,” he said, “but it makes them all crazy in the same way.”

  “Anyhow,” my mother continued, “Ginger made herself smart and fleet and cunning and fierce and as tough as a pine knot. When she went out into the woods and fields alone, to gather blackberries or pawpaws or to spend an hour in her secret playhouse, she would take no chances. She kept her eyes and ears open and if she glimpsed a suspicious move
ment or heard a stealthy noise, then she would skitter away like a blue darter. Nobody could catch her, either; not one boy big or small could run as fast as she could run. She would dare any of them to race in the schoolyard and handily leave them behind openmouthed.

  “That was another of her stratagems: to let the boys know she could take care of herself and needn’t fear them. So she would not only race them; she would fight them, too, wrastle them catch-as-catch-can or rooster-fight or battle them in any way they chose. There, too, she trounced them soundly. She wasn’t a big girl, more whippetlike—as lithe as a cane pole and wiry as a bedspring. She could take punishment and dish it out, and the days she didn’t come home with a black eye must have been days of gray boredom on her calendar.

  “But the way she free-talked and swaggered her shoulders when she walked brought about some cool feelings. The girls admired her, but they were afraid of her, too, though she never offered harm to any of them. The boys, though, were sorely riled and their first thought, after they realized that they could furnish no champion from amongst themselves to defeat Ginger, was to gang up on her. They followed her the best they could, then scoured the woods from the place where she lost them till they located the playhouse.

  “It was the custom in that time and place, Jess, for a young girl to find herself a secret hideaway and build a make-believe house. It had to be secret because her brothers or any other passing boy who came across it would destroy it. That was the tradition on both sides, just another instance of being backward, I suppose.

  “The girl would gather the prettiest little rocks she could find and smooth out a space on the ground, clearing away the leaves and sticks and toadstools and sweeping the dirt flat with a leafy branch, and then lay out her rocks in straight lines. Those were the walls of her house and she would leave spaces for doors. Then she would place in all her rooms little objects that represented different things. A piece of clear glass would be a window, you see, and a chip of crockery would be a dinner plate. An empty spool might be anything, a settee or a bed or even a harmonium. Outside the walls she might put down a mason-jar rubber and that would be the well for her water or even a neat little pond with goldfish in it. And there, in her own dear house she had designed and built with her own hands, a girl would play at being a mother with a happy family, a kind and loving husband and strong obedient sons and curly-top daughters.

  “Whether girls still build playhouses, I don’t know, but if they do, it’s a sure bet that boys try to find them and tear them up. Still, it wasn’t so easy to spy the house that Ginger Summerell made. She had disguised it, you see, in such a clever way that it didn’t look like one at first. Instead of rocks laid out in straight lines, she made curvy walls with sticks and different-colored leaves and she made her rooms so big that the stones and isinglass and buckeyes she used to represent furniture looked like they were lying there by the accident of nature. The back of her playhouse butted up against a great huge boulder.

  “Even so, the biggest and meanest of the boys found it out. His name was Orlow Jackson and he was a redheaded terror. He had bested all the boys around in wrastling and fisticuffs and so was their leader, only he was the bad kind that would get them into mischief. He had vowed black revenge on Ginger since the time she thrust him into the dirt of the schoolyard and twisted his arm behind his back till he hollered ‘calf rope.’ He found Ginger’s playhouse and laid an ambush for her. I don’t know what it was he spotted that gave her away, maybe a scrap of cloth that was a make-believe bedspread or a marble that was an alabaster lamp.

  “Anyhow, there were six of them waiting in the bushes one day when Ginger came to play. They had to be as quiet and cunning as Cherokees stalking deer, or she would have seen them. Little good, though, all their sneaking meanness did them. When they rushed out to grab her, she saw them and ran to the shadow of that great boulder and squeezed through a tight crevice there and rolled down a biggish rock to seal it behind her. Then she scampered to the top of the boulder and started showering those mean old boys with stones. Mercy, how she rocked them! It was like a hail of hurting stones out of the clouds of heaven. They couldn’t stand much of that. A smooth piece of river rock caught Orlow Jackson on his topknot and caused him to reconsider his erroneous notions of gallantry. Those six big boys left the field to Ginger Summerell. Bruised and swearing and bleeding, they turned tail.

  “Because she’d planned it out, you see. She had made a fortress atop that boulder and stocked a forethoughtful arsenal of rocks. As the years went by, she acquired a more serious arsenal: two pistols by Smith & Wesson and some kind of rifle I can’t remember and a twelve-gauge shotgun. Her daddy taught her a little and the rest she learned herself and she turned out a crack shot and would have made an admirable hunter of deer and turkey, except she didn’t care for hunting. Her weaponry had but a single purpose, as she told one and all—to shoot the dingle-dangles off of any man that might take a mind to come bothering her.

  “And none did.

  “She always knew what she wanted, had the clearest mind I ever met, man or woman. When her uncle Ferman Ball, who had lived a sad widower for thirty years, died over on Hornet Branch, she moved into his little ramshackle cabin to stay and she dared anybody to roust her out of it. Nobody took that dare, partly because they figured she had as much right to the place as any other of his few scattered kinfolk—and partly because that old house was about ready to fall down anyhow on its little acre of ground that was nothing but ragweed and saw-briar. Then, too, they knew that Ginger’s weapons stood ready to her right hand.

  “Here, too, she had a plan. She’d kept her eye on that plot as a fitting spot to live if only she could make it so. She could gather a little bit of cash money to buy building materials with because she was good to stay with children and look after them and clever with needle and thread and in a day in the corn patch or hay field would do the work of a man and a half. So everything turned out once again exactly according to her scheme. All the labor she supplied herself, and she changed that ratty old shack into a cabin as neat and sound and comfortable and pleasant as any in the county.

  “If we ever get over to Bailey Ridge, I’ll drive us by that cabin, Jess. I want you to see how it is as perfect as a picture painted by an artist.

  “She tended a generous kitchen garden and a swept dirt yard with a border of marigolds and tall zinnias. She would work for hire when that was needful, and when it wasn’t, she would sit on her front porch and maybe take a pipe of tobacco with her daddy when he came to visit or with her older brother Efird.

  “Her family was about the only company she ever had, even though her place was as inviting to look at as a fresh-baked strawberry pie. Her schoolmate girls, who had been afraid of her when they were younguns, now were cross-eyed jealous. Because they had never known and never would know the freedom she had won and guarded so carefully. Most of them had been bigged by men who were mostly no better than brutes, if you ask me, and now they were shackled to them for life. The others were the slaves, or worse, of their own fathers. And there sat Ginger Summerell in the notch of the hill above the settlement, as plain to see as a lonesome pine on the edge of a bluff, proud and free and a woman on her own terms such as had never been heard of before in Bailey Ridge. If she was fated to be an old maid whom ignorant people told jokes about, there was many a wife with a baby on each hip and a greasy pot boiling on the cookstove that would look up the mountain to her cabin and wish they could be old maids all their years.

  “But they didn’t understand Ginger’s mind, Jess, for she had another notion entirely. She had never given a serious thought to being an old maid. She sent out word around the settlement that she was a propertied woman in good health with twenty-two years of age on her who was willing to entertain proper suitors.

  “Her pattern of a proper suitor was a man who would behave in a civilized manner and was ready to talk calm good sense to a woman and would come calling on her the way sociable folks did who lived in less
ignorant places. She had read books and heard tales; she knew how things are supposed to be. None of this rutting in ditches like wild hogs and then a jackleg preacher mumbling at your swollen belly six months later. She knew what she wanted.

  “Trouble was, nobody else did. I don’t think the menfolk had a glimmer. None of them came to call on her, anyhow. Maybe they were just plain afraid.

  “Ginger waited from January till June, finishing up her work by late afternoon, milking her cow, and then setting the table for two in her kitchen. After the table was set and supper was steaming on the stove, she’d go out on her porch and sit till nightfall. Then she would go back in and eat lonesome by lamplight.

  “That was the time when people sniggered at her as an old maid, even though the term didn’t apply. Ginger was not a woman pining away her prime years, socking and sighing and growing gray and warped as a cow-lot fence.”

  * * *

  “Come the warm evenings of June, she was weary of dining alone, so one Friday afternoon she dressed in her usual outfit—which was a man’s cotton shirt and a pair of roomy gray corduroy pants and a tall-crowned straw hat—and stuffed a pistol behind her belt buckle and marched down to Bradley’s Outpost. That was a little grocery and dry goods establishment hardly as big as her cabin where the single menfolk spent their time playing checkers, spitting tobacco, and swapping lies. Bred-to-the-bone loafers, most of them, and some that were a shame and a sore trial to their mothers and fathers.

  “In strode Ginger through the rusty screen door, and when the four lazybones men saw her, the first thing they noticed was that pistol. They fell silent as she swept her gaze over them one by one, top to bottom. When Exum Bradley, behind the cloth counter, asked what he could do for her, she replied, ‘I don’t see a thing here that I could use. I reckon I’ll have to come back later.’ And out she strode again, and up the hill to her house to shed her pistol and sit down to a cold supper of buttermilk and string beans and dry corn bread.