Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You Read online

  “That’s good. That’s fine. Now I’ll let your head down. That was real good.”

  O Cora, I’m bound away.

  “Just you rest now.”

  I need to rest and breathe a little, they said or thought together. There is a mighty power of time in the room that is taking all my strength to fight. I need to think there is someone alongside me in the struggle.

  THE SHOOTING WOMAN

  “Your mother tells me,” my grandmother said, “that you’re sweet on that little Sarah Robinson.”

  “I wish she wouldn’t say that,” I objected. “I don’t see how it is anybody’s business but my own. What makes her think so, anyhow? I never said I was. I wish—”

  “I can tell it’s the truth,” my grandmother said. “Your stuttering and muttering gives you clean away. You might as well wear a valentine heart pinned to your shirt that proclaims your sentiment to all the world. You don’t think liking a girl is something to be ashamed of, do you?”

  “Maybe not. But I don’t want to be talking about it.”

  “Well, it’s been going on for a mighty long time. It’s nothing but natural for men and women to pair up together. You can understand that much, I reckon.”

  “Yessum.” I remembered how my father had told me the story of Helen of Troy and how I’d later discovered that Helen still haunted the dreams of all men everywhere. I remembered all the women that streamed to Uncle Luden like black ants to a sorghum stir-off. I thought of Romeo and Juliet. But these skirmishes with history and legend little prepared me for the turmoil that rose smoky within me each time I saw Sarah or heard her name spoken or thought of her plump pink hands and neatly pointed chin. Those were her cardinal points, I judged, but I also devoted happy reverie to her billowy ash-blond hair and dark blue eyes that turned violet when she brooded over some injury or slight, fancied or real. I had to concede that her ankles were fat and didn’t seem to belong to the rest of her body—what I’d seen of it, anyhow—but I figured I could accustom myself to them. Over a period of time, I’d get so I didn’t notice how they bulged over her shoe straps and turned purplish in cold weather. Then when I realized that I was thinking about a “period of time”—which meant a long period—I became apprehensive and began to wonder why I was keeping secrets from myself and how dire those secrets were.

  “Have you planned out what you’re going to do about that pretty little miss?” my grandmother asked.

  “No, ma’am. I didn’t figure I needed to do anything.”

  “Well, maybe you don’t. It’s better to make your mind straight and clear in these matters before you act,” she said. “You don’t want to play the fool.” She held a jar against the musty ivory glow of the twenty-five-watt bulb that hung above us, wiped it with the dirty old pink flannel rag, and peered into it again.

  We were in the storeroom off the kitchen hallway. It was a windowless little space with big wooden bins for flour and cornmeal on the left-hand side; ranged above these around three walls stood tiers of shelves holding mason jars of edibles, the products of long, steamy canning sessions in summer and autumn. There were gallon jars of grainy-looking chopped cabbage and cob corn and whole tomatoes in brine. My favorites were the squat half-pint jars of relishes and preserves and the red-speckled gold chowchow and the dark ruby strawberry preserves and the tarry blackberry-jam jars with their silver helmets of hardened wax. Most of the jars were quarts of vegetables: whole okra and chopped, mustard greens and turnip greens, pudgy lima beans. There were meats, too: sausage balls in fat that looked and smelled like library paste, Brunswick stew as livid orange in color as fresh-cut pumpkin. Cherries gone gray-pink, vegetable soups, hot-pepper relish—shelf after shelf.

  It was as if my grandmother was planning for our survival through a new Ice Age. But some of the jars had been there for maybe decades, and every year she and I or someone else in the family dusted and inspected them, discarding the ones that looked suspicious, pressure-creviced or spoiled by faulty seals. After a few years the jar rubbers could stiffen and crack and air would seep into the spicy applesauce and turn it to vinegar mush, a metamorphosis my grandmother greeted with bitter lamentation. She hated waste worse than a hard-shell deacon hates sin, but if our family had multiplied like barn rats and eaten for a generation, we would hardly have made a dimple in this store of provender.

  She handed the jar to me. “What do you think it is? It’s turned so dark, I can’t tell.”

  I held it up. Lumps of vague shadow swam in a blue-pink murk. “I think it’s beets,” I said, and gave it back.

  She smelled around the seal, turned it to the light once more, and gave it a vigorous shake. “We’ll keep it through the winter,” she said, “but if we don’t eat it this year, we’ll feed it to the hogs next spring.”

  The pigs were in for a treat. She didn’t trust the jar enough to bring it to the table, but she couldn’t yet bear to part with it. Whatever it was—beets or baby turnips or purple plums from the old tree by the stone bridge—it was going to enjoy one more anniversary at least.

  I took another jar off the shelf and gave it to her. She wiped it absentmindedly and returned it. “These next six are all grape juice,” she said. “They’re sound. We don’t need to look at them.”

  Oh Lord, her famous grape juice. She never checked the seals for leaks on these jars, even though they were often found to be loose or cracked. My father claimed she did it with cunning aforethought, that my teetotaling grandmother was making wine accidently on purpose by letting her grape juice ferment. At the end of a long day in the hayfield or tobacco patch she might send me to fetch a jar of her cooling grape juice. One jar out of two would be sour wine. “Oh my,” she would say, “air must have got into this jug. Maybe I’d better pour it out.” But she would be prevailed upon to forgo such shocking waste and we would pass the jar around, and the fuzzy glow we felt at sunset was not entirely that produced by a task well done. She never gave up the ritual, and over the summer weeks those of us laboring with her, or under her persnickety direction, would glance at one another during jar openings and silently mouth her unchanging benediction: Oh-my-air-must-have-got-into-this-jug.

  When we moved on to a row of sweet pickles, she said, “But sooner or later you’ll have to do something.”

  “About what?”

  “About your sweetheart.”

  “She’s not my sweetheart.”

  “Well, if you want her to be your sweetheart, you’re going to have to plan what to do and then carry it through. If you keep on piddling around, some other young buck will come along and take her out to a barn dance and then begin sparking on her and she’ll be his girl. Then you’ll stand at the gate and moan.”

  She often confused me with her old-time thoughts and expressions. As soon as I’d felt a flash of vanity at hearing myself considered a young buck, I had to picture myself standing at a pasture gate mooing to be fed and milked, like a forlorn Guernsey at twilight. “Well, what do you think I should do?”

  “You should declare your affections,” my grandmother said, “and then take steps to impress them on her heart.”

  “But what if she turns me down?”

  “Then you’ll know where you stand, which is a lot more than you know now. Once you know whether or not she finds you likely, you can plan to spend time with her or with another girl. Somebody whispered in my ear that Sarah Robinson wasn’t the only fetching young thing in Harwood County.”

  “She’s the only one for me.”

  “If that’s how you feel, then you’d better load up your shotgun and go kite hunting.” She held another jar up to the light and inspected it as closely as Charles Darwin ever examined a trilobite.

  “I don’t know what that means—kite hunting,” I complained. “I hear you and Mama say that, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t know the story? You don’t know how your daddy and mother courted each other? You never heard about Ben Franklin’s kite?”

>   “Not exactly.” I wasn’t really fibbing. I’d heard the story several times from my father, but never from my mother or grandmother. I’d understood from listening closely that the various stories I heard about specific events didn’t always match; sometimes, in fact, they were totally contradictory. I never gave up on finding out the truth of any of them but considered that extraordinary measures would be required to discover it. The truth was like one of these mysterious jars we were flanneling. My grandmother would hold it to the unrevealing light and declare the contents to be peaches; my mother would surmise that they were beets; to me they looked like green tomatoes. Then when the jar was opened, with red-faced exertion and partially suppressed profanity, by my father we would be assailed by the smells of sugared vinegar, allspice, mustard, dill weed, and strong pepper. Pickled crab apples awaited our pleasure; grayish in color—like most of the foods my grandmother canned—they were welcome sour-sweet company for sausage biscuits or scrambled eggs or pork chops fried, according to custom, terra-cotta-hard. I generally found these surprises of truth agreeable, even when I’d had my mouth set for green tomatoes.

  For thirty years I’ve carried conflicting versions of many stories in my mind and have come no closer to discerning the truth than when I was fifteen.

  It was no use asking my father about the truth. He’d gaze at one of these jars long and hard, as if it was full of silver dollars and he was counting each and every. Then, in a voice grave with deliberation, he would aver that the vessel contained thousand-year-old eggs from the Kiangsu province of China, brought to America at great financial expense and at the further cost of the lives of two sailors who had sacrificed themselves to save these eggs when their junk was swamped by the great feckless pleasure yacht of the Rockefellers during a drunken bribery orgy for twelve U.S. senators, including especially North Carolina’s own Jack G. Horsebun. That was my father’s variation on the senator’s real name, and it was so apt that it long ago supplanted his official cognomen in my mind.

  So I’d heard the story about the courtship of my parents and the wonderful kite of Benjamin Franklin, but I’d never heard my grandmother’s particular account and expected it to differ, in some of the details at least, from the one I’d garnered from my father. But having broached the subject, she didn’t seem eager to pursue it. She kept peering into the mystery she held against the puny wattage, as if some secret figuration there would help her decide whether to tell the story or not. Then she smiled one of her private smiles and wiped it away with her characteristic gesture and said, “Well, you know that your daddy and mama started out as schoolteachers up the river at the Bigelow community. Joe Robert always claims he didn’t like schoolteaching and never had any knack for it and thought it then and now a profession fit only for the female gender, as he calls us women. But he was a pretty fair schoolmaster, after all, from what I hear tell, and if he’d stuck with that, he might have been county superintendent by now. Of course, he’d have to settle down from his flibberty ways and not back-sass one and all in every rank above him, and I expect he was never going to do that. It’s not in your daddy’s nature to travel in any fashion except against the current, and the stronger it tries to push him back, the better he likes it.”

  * * *

  She sighed a small gray wisp of a sigh and paused a moment before going on.

  “But of course that was the main quality that drew Cora to him. Just as soon as he arrived for his first year of teaching, he showed himself no great respecter of the rules, sneaking down to the boiler room for a cigarette and maybe a nip of whiskey with the old colored janitor that was always there. And not fibbing about it, either, but admitting it straight off when Jake Silverside brought him to task. I reckon he felt he knew all about Jake, the way all the young bucks thought they had his number. Jake was going on sixty years then and had just married Agnes Rorty from somewhere down around Spruce Pine. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, if that. So there was a lot of sniggering about Jake behind his back. But that all stopped when Agnes gave birth to a strapping eight-pound man-child, some say nine months exactly to the day of the wedding and some say not quite.

  “Jake learned from asking him that your daddy wasn’t the kind to weasel but would look him right in the eye and tell the truth whether it might harm his own interest or not. About something like that, your daddy is as straight as Honest Abe, though not otherwise, I am ashamed to admit. And your daddy learned he wouldn’t be able to hoo-raw Jake; the principal wouldn’t be persnickety about every little regulation, but he expected all the teachers, including Joe Robert, to abide by the reasonable ones.

  “You know, I never thought before, but they were right much alike, Jake and Joe Robert. They both felt they were only filling in time at the schoolhouse, waiting for Hoover’s Depression to pass away so they could get on with their real business. Jake was going to start up a construction company that would take on the upkeep of a lot of private roads and driveways way back in the hills where the big outfits didn’t care to go, the money too scant for their notice. And your daddy was waiting, too; he wanted to be … well, I don’t know what Joe Robert wanted to be. I’m still hoping to find out. Maybe he is hoping, too, since he’s trying so many different things.

  “Anyhow, he told the truth and took his reprimand in front of the other teachers and didn’t bad-mouth Jake Silverside afterward. His manliness in the matter impressed your mother. From that day forward she kept her eye on Joe Robert, and it wasn’t long before she conceived a warm affection for him that soon ripened into a passion.

  “‘Oh Mama, Mama,’ she said to me one Saturday morning, ‘what am I going to do?’ She was as mournful in the face as any grave-digging sexton.

  “‘Now, daughter,’ I told her, ‘you must listen to the dictates of your heart and do what your better nature allows.’

  “‘But I don’t know what to do,’ she said, ‘for I want Joe Robert to love me as deep as I love him.’

  “I thought she might burst out wailing then and was glad she didn’t. I brought her up to be an independent woman, as independent as any man. Our family has never harbored crybabies, male or female. I expect you to remember that, Jess. I said to her, ‘You must do something so he’ll take notice. We could invite him here to supper, but then he’d figure you’ve got your cap set for him. If you’re too forward, you’ll scare him off like a buck deer in hunting season. Why don’t you find out what he’s interested in most of all and strike up conversing with him on that special subject? That’s how he will center you in his sights.’

  “She heaved a sigh so deep it might have turned a weather vane. ‘He’s not interested in anything at all except his dreary old science,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the least thing about chemistry and atoms and all that.’

  “‘You’re a shining scholar,’ I said. ‘You took high honors at Carson-Newman College and the University of Tennessee. If you think science will help you to attract his gaze, you must learn all about science.’

  “‘I’ve got no head for it,’ she told me. ‘As soon as I look at them, the numbers and facts run together in a soup. And besides—’

  “‘What, then?’

  “‘Well, I’m just not pretty enough,’ she said. ‘Every other teacher there is prettier than me. I believe Joe Robert has already got his eye on that new Frobisher girl that teaches home ec. I don’t stand a hoot owl’s chance against her.’

  “Then I gave her the facts in no uncertain terms. ‘Just hush,’ I said, ‘hush up that kind of talk right now. Men don’t know what pretty is; they don’t have the least faint glimmer of a notion. All you have to do is keep yourself clean and fresh and groom your hair and walk with your shoulders straight. Good character is what makes a woman handsome,’ I said, ‘and your character will show in your face like lamplight behind a window shade.’

  “‘But Mama,’ she started, and I wouldn’t hear any more.

  “‘No,’ I said. ‘You round us up some books of science to commence with an
d I’ll help you. I’ll quiz you every night on what you’ve read.’

  “I could tell she wasn’t satisfied, but that was the plan we followed, reading in the evening after all our chores were done and she’d graded the papers she always brought home from school. I washed the dishes in order to help her out a little. Then we’d slap open a book and stare at it together. We couldn’t have been more mystified if we’d been looking at the ancient Hebrew language. But we didn’t give up.

  “Whether that was the key to Joe Robert’s attention or not, I don’t know. But something was, for he began to take note of Cora. His notice wasn’t strong enough to suit her, but it was something to work on, she told me. She had a clue to his interests and thought it a telling one. That’s what she said, and I was relieved to hear the happy sound in her voice that so long had been downcast.

  “At that time, she was teaching English and history and Spanish to the ninth and tenth grades. So she had quite a store of work ahead of her every morning from the hour she arose from bed, what with her chores here at home added to the tasks of teaching. I knew what she faced because I’d done the very same thing myself at her age, rising early to do the farm and household tasks, then riding my bay mare Sookie up the mountain to the Long Branch school. Of course, that was just a little one-room schoolhouse, but my twelve or fifteen pupils were a rare handful for me to manage, I can tell you that. And I never had the advantage of learning a foreign tongue, as Cora has done. She knows Spanish and French to read and speak, but all I ever gathered was a scrap or two of Latin, and that mostly by accident. I hear tell, Jess, that you take a keen interest in the ancient tongues, and that’s something to admire, because it’s so close to how Moses and Jesus and Paul spoke in the Bible. I always wanted to learn the language they spoke but had no opportunity.… I do recall some Latin words, though. Agricola, that means ‘farmer.’