Milkweed Ladies Read online

  So the sea was always close to the land on Swago Crick, and the strange names: Fiji Islands, Patagonia, Manila Bay. Yet because the land would never let him go, G.D. would hitch up old Bird and go out and plow the corn. By the time G.D. had come back from the navy, my family had been on the farm so long that it would not let loose of its people and had its own meanings laid down in secret under its earth, under the scattered stones of Old Tom’s first cabin, and under the sweet clover roots of the Hollow Meadow, under the bluegrass pastures and the corn.

  Granny Fanny’s Thorn Broom Handle

  The summer of 1911 was the summer The Slashing saved the farm. The Slashing, that tangled mass of dead braches the loggers had left on Captain Jim’s up-the-hollow when they skidded away the virgin oak, had begun to let in sunlight that summer and had allowed black raspberries to grow. Even now, seventy-five years later, when I go home, my sister Elizabeth and I will sometimes speak about The Slashing as though it were still a living thing. That winter, the year I was born and the old Captain died, there was no money and no job for G.D., still unable to practice law. G.D. began to write short stories that winter because he thought he might get a little money from them.

  He sat late at the kitchen table, writing sea stories and railroad stories, and two eerie ones called “The White Dog” and “The Black Pearl.” Then he typed them up on an old Oliver typewriter he got hold of and sent them off to the magazines and got them back.

  It had been six years since G.D. had touched a drop of whiskey, and he and Mama began talking about him trying for a school job. He would have to take the teachers’ examination, and to take it, he would have to go to town. He had no decent shoes and no decent suit of clothes to wear, and so, as he and Mama tried to plan, the new clothes became almost a life and death matter. At last, G.D. talked of selling one of the cows, or of going back to the navy. He kept talking about it, and Mama would cry. But before G.D. could decide, the springtime came, and The Slashing began to leaf out again.

  One day when Mama was picking a mess of greens for supper, she saw, spreading across the ruined tangles of the hilltop, some tall white flowers, acres of white flower bushes. When she went to look, she saw that they were black raspberry vines. Mama told that she had never seen such a patch of raspberries, and she would tell it again and again, always, as though The Slashing had been sent by God. The wild birds must have planted the seeds, for usually a slash will come in blackberry vines and fireweed, and the only raspberries on the farm had been a few bushes around the orchard fence.

  Black raspberries always sold at a good price, and as the blooms fell off and the green berries began to form, Mama watched and hoped for rain. A good wet season came, and in July, our miracle: the wild harvest. The berries ripened juicy and purple-black, bushels of them; and Mama and G.D. and Granny Fanny, with my older brother and sister helping them, went up into The Slashing and picked and picked. I was only a baby and stayed with Aunt Malindy, and Mama would come home every few hours to let me suck. In the evening, they brought home the great lipping-full buckets and carried them down to Milltown for straight cash.

  So G.D. got his shoes and new suit, walked to town, took the teachers’ exam and passed it. There was a vacancy in the home school and the trustees decided to give him a chance. G.D. went to teaching that fall of 1911 and taught in one school or another, and later in college, for nearly fifty years.

  When G.D. was seventy-four, his college gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree, and just for the hell of it, his young lawyer friend wrote a letter to Charleston and got the old sailor readmitted to the West Virginia bar. These legal proceedings put G.D. into a quizzical frame of mind. A few laugh wrinkles gathered around his eyes and—as though speaking of the world in general—he made one guarded remark: “It’s something of an oddity to me.”

  In the early years of his teaching, G.D. had some orange handbills printed up and went around the county on another speaking tour. His speech this time was called “The World Through a Porthole,” and he would tell the people about geography, and about Cannibal Tom, and the historic passage his fleet had made through the Magellan Straits. He carried his mementos in his Sea Chest and displayed them in faded one-room schoolhouses all up and down the cricks: the boomerang from Australia; the iridescent mother-of-pearl; Cannibal Tom’s eating fork; and the great piece of brown and white tapa cloth from out in the Pacific islands of Polynesia and Samoa. The names called softly in the country schoolhouses: Coral Sea, Pago Pago; and on the wall of our best room in the farmhouse, G.D.‘s “diploma” hung in its nice frame, bordered with seahorses, and sea serpents, and starry ocean shapes. G.D. got his “diploma” when he had been initiated into the Holy Order of Neptune as the fleet crossed the equator going south. At night by the fire, if I asked politely, I was allowed to look again at the tapa cloth and Cannibal Tom’s fork, and I would study intently the postcard picture of Cannibal Tom, riding a bicycle naked. I had never seen a bicycle, though I had heard Mama sing about one built for two.

  One of my first memories is of Mama in her Japanese kimono, sitting by the wood-stove, singing me a song. The isinglass windows on the stove glow red, and on top of the stove is a shining, silvery decoration like the steeple on a church. Mama is holding me in the warmth of her kimono—the only beautiful garment she owns—a Japanese kimono made of palest green stuff, with white chrysanthemums and pale birds flying through the flowers. Mama’s hair is loose around her shoulders and falls down to her waist in a golden-lighted fan. Somehow, she is not at all the Mama I know day by day in the kitchen and barnyard, the work-ridden farm woman in her calico dress, faded sunbonnet, and ugly Sears Roebuck shoes. As we sit there, she is singing to me:

  Sweet bunch of daisies brought from the dell,

  Kiss me once darling, daisies won’t tell

  Or the song is sad and low:

  Many the hearts that are breaking

  If we could read them all;

  Many the hearts that are breaking

  After the ball.

  I remember another song Mama would play on her old “potato bug” mandolin out on the porch in summer, with our new porch swing squeaking back and forth. Sometimes we would get a lemon from town and have lemonade, and Mama would play:

  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.

  I’m most crazy, all for the love of you.

  All day Mama worked over the hot stove in the kitchen or scrubbed clothes on her washboard or milked the cows up at the milk pen. Or she sewed our clothes on her foot-treadle sewing machine, or in the fall, rendered out hot lard and canned the sausage cakes. But I always remember the other Mama, sitting in her pale green kimono or standing out in the meadow with a wild pink rose in her hand. For, besides her tame flowers, her snowballs, bridal wreath, and thousand-leafed rose bush, Mama knew all the flowers of the fields and woodlands: the orange meadow lilies, the purple hepaticas on the rock, the pale dancing Dutchman’s britches on The Slashing hill, growing there in the half shade as The Slashing covered its scars and came to woods again.

  There was even a sweet-brier rose, the English eglantine of the poets, growing on the wild hillside under Bridger’s Gap. It had escaped from some cabin dooryard; and the horehound had escaped too, and the sweet anise, wandering away from the cabins and running wild on the hills. In later years, when I too wandered away, I would find them and cry out their names in recognition: Sweet William hiding in the grasses of the prairie, blue lupine I found in the sand barrens of Carolina, a pink lady slipper in a Maine forest, tansy by a Massachusetts cellar hole, or sometimes I can still smell, blowing east over Hartford, Connecticut, the scent of cinnamon rose.

  The cinnamon rose on the wall of our farmhouse belonged to Granny Fanny, my father’s mother, and hers too, the row of bachelor buttons, the pink sweet rockets by the garden fence. But Granny Fanny had little time for fussing around with flowers. She was busy in the kitchen or stable or running the hills with her gunnysack, picking her loads of wild plums or wormy apples, or
half-rotten kindling wood.

  In 1914, the Austrian archduke had been assassinated at Sarajevo and the world was engulfed in war, but Granny was not of this century; she was wild and running free. Born in 1840, she still roved the rocks and waste places, tended her ash hopper, which made lye for her homemade soap, and poured tallow into her candle molds.

  It was as though, standing in her hilly pocket sometime about 1861 or 1862, she had set her thorn broom handle into the world’s axis and brought it to a grinding halt. In her long black dress and black bonnet, she walked the hills of another time, and perhaps, even of another country, and gathered pokes of horehound and “life everlasting” to cure the twentieth century of its “bloody flux.” She was an old pioneer woman, thin and wrinkled as a dried apple, and with her secret in her that she always kept from everyone. On her back, where she had bent it so long under the burdens, a great knot had grown as big as a wooden maul. In her old age, she wore it like a saddle, the seal and saddle of the mountain woman.

  When she was no longer needed in the kitchen, Granny Fanny would go into the fields and woodlands with her gunnysack, or she would take her thorn bush broom and sweep the dirt from the floor of the woodshed, then sweep the path and yard so slick and clean that there was hardly a splinter left. Or she would find a dead sheep out in the pasture, pull the wool off it, pick the burrs from the wool, wash it, card it, spin it, and knit it into crooked mittens and socks. But she would never sew or do fine quilting or mend the clothes. If clothes wore out, she threw them in the fire.

  Granny Fanny was not at all a proper woman like my other grandma, my mother’s mother, Grandma Susan, who worked only at housework and wove coverlets and always spoke so nice and fine. Granny Fanny would sometimes have a high fit of temper, pack up her black “gretchel,” and go whipping over the hill to Aunt Mat’s. She was high tempered, tight-lipped, even, in a sense, an unlovable woman, and yet I loved her with a wild, fierce kind of love and would always fly to her defense. But Granny Fanny had her own sharp tongue, her black “gretchel,” and her secret. When I was a child, I could feel that secret in her, and I wanted to know. I wanted to know so much that sometimes, when she tried to sing, I would look at her hard and try to see if her secret was hidden down in the song. Granny was not one for singing and had only one tune. She would sing it in her high cracked monotone, always the song about the little horses:

  Oh, the black and the bay and the dapple gray

  And all the pretty little horses.

  Sometimes her cracked voice would get to running over and over in my head, and in years after, whenever I thought of Granny Fanny, her song would come back to me like the crackle of thorns in the hearthfire.

  Grandma Susan would sing in church: “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,” or “Rock of ages cleft for me”; but Granny Fanny would not go to church, nor to prayer meetings, nor to the pie suppers down at school. The only place she would go was to trade and barter. She would “take her foot in her hand,” she said, and whip down over the hill to sell her butter pats or jars of apple butter. She would trade her goods for sugar and coffee and tobacco, for she was still smoking her old corncob pipe, and would carry her store things back home in her sack. If she got cash money, she would put it in her long black leather purse, then stick it under her bed tick to be safe and sound. Granny had never heard of the Protestant Ethic; she was just an uneducated old woman who hadn’t learned the evils of working and saving, and she wanted no foolish things—only coffee and tobacco, and her mantel clock with the gargoyles staring out above its face. The only time she ever spent money “foolishly” was the time she went to White Sulphur, a journey of some forty miles, to attend the reunion of Confederate veterans—a trip that was always spoken of in the household as though Granny Fanny had gone to farthest Spain.

  White Sulphur was where the Old South had once curtsied on the Greenbrier piazzas, and where the Rebels and Yankees had fought along the road in the desperate August days of 1863. Granny Fanny had helped with the wounded there, and there she first met Grandpa Jim, the old Captain. In 1913, at the reunion, she heard the drums beating again and saw the “Stars and Bars” floating there.

  To Granny Fanny, and to all of us in 1913, Captain Jim’s war was still “The War.” “Back in time of The War,” Granny would say; and the Captain’s bills of Confederate money were still hidden down in the closet trunk. “Before The War,” “In time of The War,” we said, as though it had been the only war on earth.

  In 1916, we got our first telephone on the farm, and one of the first pieces of news I remember it bringing us was of a new war. It was a big black wall telephone and you could call “Central” with “a short and a long.” The telephone man walked by our house every week or so to check the blue glass things up on the poles. The line ran across our farm fields, up Bridger’s Mountain, and through the Gap. It followed the old Seneca Indian road, and the telephone wires would sing in the wind. In April 1917, Mama got a telephone call that we had declared war on Germany.

  So the Swago boys began to go off to war again: Cousin Coe and Cousin Cliff, Cousin Paul from up at town; and Elbert Messer and Dennis Cloonan; then Jim Auldridge, from down the river road. G.D. wanted to enlist in the navy, and though Mama begged him not to, he wrote anyway, telling them about his navy years. He felt they could use him, needed him, and when the answer came back that they didn’t want him, he was quiet and bit on his pipestem. He was over forty years old.

  G.D. went all over the county in the winter of 1917, selling war bonds; and he went up to the train to say good-bye to the boys and wrote to Cousin Coe over in France. Mama knitted khaki hug-me-tights and mittens. We had meatless days and talked about the “Starving Armenians” and “The Huns.” One day, when I found a poke of candy out in the elderberry patch, Mama made me throw it away because, she said, the Germans might be dropping pokes of candy down from their airplanes to poison American children.

  1918 was the winter of the flu, and when I was better, I knelt down by my bed in my long flannel nightgown to say my prayers: “God keep the boys safe Over There. Don’t let the Kaiser kill them. Bring them all home safe.”

  At night, G.D. would come home with his copy of the Toledo Blade and read us the news from the Marne, Belleau Wood, and Flanders Fields. And down at the village, they painted the river bridge from red to a dull gray color so the Germans could not see it and bomb it down.

  After the armistice, Elbert Messer and Jim Auldridge came home to die, but Cousin Coe and Cousin Paul were safe. Down at school, we learned the poem by heart:

  In Flanders Fields the poppies grow

  Between the crosses row on row

  That mark our place and in the sky

  The larks still bravely singing fly.

  Then, almost as suddenly as it had come to us, the war faded into the past. They buried Elbert Messer up on our Graveyard Hill and gave the coffin flag to his mother for, Mama said, you must never bury the flag. So Captain Jim and Elbert lay not too far from one another; and Granny Nancy, whose father had come over with Lafayette, lay just inside the rusted gate. Death and life always run together, so in the last spring of the war, a little boy was born and named for the old Captain. We called him Jimmy, my brother, Young Jim.

  With another war behind us and the quiet years ahead, we were all there at home under Bridger’s Mountain, and Granny Fanny, eighty years old and her hair suddenly bobbed off with “the Flappers,” was still running the fields to gather in her pokes of tea herbs: “life everlasting” and pennyroyal. When I walked with her across those autumn waste places and heard her speak the name, “life everlasting,” my mind kept repeating it. It was a dry, gray ugly flower that lay like a talisman in my heart.

  By 1918, most of America had left the old agrarian ways behind; yet down on Swago, down on all the little farms of Appalachia, the mountain geography still closed us inward. Granny Fanny’s thorn broom handle was still stuck into the world’s axis, holding it tight and strong.

  The Door
Peg

  Because those years were the years of my childhood, I might tell them in a way that would break my heart. But my heart does not break. There is a kind of benison that falls sometimes on the fields and mountains. Sometimes it is sunlight; or a slow misty rain; or a goose-feather snow drifting down from the sky; and the mountains ringing the fields, ringing the little village down at the crossroads and the white steeple of the Upper Church. And though I realize that I am old now, so that the years play tricks on me, it is all still there sometimes, an unchanged presence, even the rat manure in the water spring; and sometimes we are still at home and it is summer.

  There was our old house with its surrounding yards and milkgap and log outbuildings. Then, a mile away, was the little village of Swago with its store and schoolhouse and its four houses all gathered around the crick and Rush Run. The Lower Church was just around the hill, and a mile or so up the road was the Dry Crick community with its own white church, called the Upper Church, and its farmhouses and little hilly farms. Grandpa Will, my mother’s father, with his neat brown beard and happy blue eyes, lived up Dry Crick, and he had a seckel pear tree that he would shake down for us on summer Sunday afternoons.

  Four long miles away was Marlinton, with its little main street and shaded streets of white houses, its new railroad track, new depot, and courthouse square. To the south of us, about two miles down, was Mill Point, where the old Cackley Fort had once stood, where Granny Fanny traded at the country store and G.D. and I went to grind our grain at the waterwheel grist mills. Mill Point was a far journey for us, to be taken only for trade and flour. Cousin Wint’s store was closer, down at Swago village, and it was the village and the Dry Crick settlement that made up the hill-narrowed neighborhood, the green rocky enclave that sheltered us and our kin.