Milkweed Ladies Read online

  We were kin to nearly everybody, married our cousins—like G.D. married Mama—and clung to each other like a nest of cockleburs. All up and down the dirt roads and footpaths were our kin people: Grandpa Will and Grandma Susan, Mama’s old parents, and all the aunts, uncles, great uncles, great aunts, step aunts, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and fourth. We never claimed kin beyond the fourth cousin. Mama’s two sisters lived up at town and had running water in their houses and took tub baths.

  Every summer at Chautauqua time, when “culture” came to rural America in a tent, I went for a week to visit Aunt Lucy, and Cousin Helen and I could be in Junior Chautauqua, or play hop-scotch, and stroll along the sidewalk eating ice cream cones. And every night we would take tub baths in Aunt Lucy’s tub. At home, we had to bathe in a washtub with water out of the rain barrel. There were no comforts such as bathtubs and hop-scotch down at the farm, but the rest of the year I spent there and learned it all by heart.

  There were the fields and pastures and Captain Jim’s sturdy Dutch cottage. But a dining room and kitchen ell made out of an unpainted sawmill shanty had been stuck onto the back of the house to make more room. Both of the shanty rooms were papered inside with heavy old building paper nailed on with short nails and big round tin caps. The roof of the dining room leaked, and great curves of wallpaper full of rain water would hang down above the dining table ready to burst. One of us kids would take a table fork, climb up on the table, thrust the fork into the great bubble two or three times so the rain water would pour out. We would catch it in the dishpan and hope that no big rain would come at meal time, particularly when there was company or harvest hands. For as long as we lived there, we coped with this problem in a casual way. It never occurred to anybody to climb up on the roof and fix it, for we could always make do and G.D. was always busy working on writing his short stories, or later, his civics book. He would sit unperturbed, writing up an analysis of the Constitution, as the rain water came pouring down.

  We had a fly problem too: no screens, and long before the time of fly spray. In summer the flies would swarm black in the dining room and kitchen and, on a hot and rainy evening, would cover the ceilings where they liked to roost. We always had to keep the food covered or put away in the cupboard, and we would cover the perennial dishes of jams and jellies on the dining room table with an old tablecloth. Just before mealtime the word would go out to “come and help me scare the flies,” and any two of us would close all the window blinds in the dining room, open up one of the outside doors, and suddenly slam the other. In the darkened room, we would grab up the old tablecloth and a piece of old sheet and beat and flap the air frantically to drive the swarm of black flies before us to the outside door.

  The kitchen part of the ell was fairly sturdy and did not leak, though sometimes in summer blades of pale grass might grow through the cracks of the floor. When they did, we pulled them out and wondered at their pale green whiteness, growing there under the dark of the house. Under this open part of the house, we threw our dry midden: dog bones, broken glass jars, bottles, and pieces of broken tools. We threw wet stuff, like leftovers and dish water, into the slop bucket to feed to the hogs.

  Around the house was the Little Yard, enclosed with its rough plank fence to protect Mama’s flowers from the calves. Outside the Little Yard, in the Big Yard were Grandpa Jim’s old log outbuildings: the dug-out springhouse with the log granary up over the top, the chicken house, and out behind the chicken house, the privy with its two square-cut holes. Mama was always mad at Buzz Rogers for cutting the holes square instead of round like in Grandpa Will’s privy, which also had pink-sprigged wallpaper and a box of lime.

  We milked the cows up at the milkgap and kept the covered milk crocks in the cold water down in the springhouse. The spring water ran out of a pipe into a wooden water trough that Grandpa Jim had hollowed out with his adz long ago. We churned butter, standing on the stone floor and using an up-and-down wooden churn.

  There were two troubles with the springhouse: rat manure from the granary up above kept falling through the cracks of the old logs and down into the water trough where we got our drinking and cooking water, and Grandpa Jim’s old drain had been clogged up for forty years.

  Every morning, the first one of us to the springhouse would find the bottom of the water trough covered with disintegrating rat turds. Two or three times a day we had to bail all the water out of the trough, wash the turds out, scald the trough with a teakettle of water, then push the trough back in place and wait for the clean water to run. We tried to be careful, but as Granny Fanny said, everybody has to eat a peck of dirt before he dies.

  One summer a weasel got into the granary up over the springhouse and the rats ran out and jumped into the limbs of the big apple tree. Hundreds of rats hung there like bunches of black fruit, weighing down the branches of the tree. G.D. and my two brothers got their guns out and the rats dropped all around—forty or more of them, bloody on the ground in front of the springhouse door.

  Every time a good rain came, the drain clogged and the springhouse flooded. All of us would come tearing, laughing and screaming and histing up our skirts and pants legs to wade out into the swirling waters. We would rescue the crocks and the tall churn and its dasher and lug them out under the apple tree until the storm was over and the water run down. Then we would sweep the mud and rat turds off the floor stones and move back in.

  The hog pen stood on the hill right above the springhouse. We took it as a sort of easy destiny that we would all eat our peck of dirt. We were never sick either, except with things like mumps and chickenpox, and Mama’s gallstones. Captain Jim drank the water for forty-one years and lived to be eighty-eight; Granny Fanny drank it for fifty-eight years and lived to be ninety-two; G.D. drank it, off and on, for fifty-five years and lived to be eighty-seven; but Mama, who drank it for only twenty-six years, lived to be only eighty-two.

  The main part of the house that Captain Jim built was clean and had three of the rooms wallpapered, one with big red roses on the wall. After G.D. was able to pay for it, Mama had a big kitchen range, silver-bright with scrollwork and with a big warming oven. Pressed into its door face were the words “Malleable Steel Range Company, South Bend, Indiana.”

  I learned to read from the newspapers pasted on one side of the kitchen wall and from reading the name on the stove and the name, “Mother” on the oats boxes, and “Arbuckle’s Coffee,” “Silver Brand Pure Lard,” and “Wheeling Steel.” Before I was old enough to go to school, my brother Ward and my sister Elizabeth would come home with their books and study by the kitchen table at night under the light of a glass oil lamp. I would climb up beside them, and they taught me to read in Mace’s Beginners’ History, stories about Dan Boone, George Rogers Clark, and “Nolichucky Jack.” While Elizabeth and Ward were away at school, I would stand looking out the winter window at the great trees and imagine the hunter men walking there through the shadows until they disappeared through the Cumberland Gap.

  G.D. had two cases of books along the wall in the best bedroom: his old school books and stories like Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and In Days of Bruce. G.D. always was a soft touch for a book salesman. He said that an education was the only thing “they” couldn’t take away, and he was always bringing home a new set of books: a green encyclopedia, and the red and gold set of Charles Dickens, and the green and gold set of the World’s Best Literature with hard pieces in it like ones by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Immanuel Kant. I didn’t like Immanuel Kant too well, but I liked the Scotch stories, and especially Lorna Doone. I read Dickens, Homer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy, and The Girl of the Limberlost. Sometimes I would take Lorna Doone to the haymow and read it there, lying in the soft golden hay of the loft. On rainy days we played there, jumping and sliding down the steep slippery hills of hay.

  To get into the loft, we put our bare feet between the cracks of the logs and climbed up the wall to the door of the mow. The logs were worn with f
eet climbing up and, thrust into the hole of the door, was Captain Jim’s old square-knobbed wooden peg, slick with wear. In a way, this peg was almost a living thing to me. It was just an old door peg, knotted and familiar and strong, and it held the door shut. But it fitted tight into its log as though it was strong enough to hold together the whole barn, the house, the fields, the little village, and all our kinfolk spread up and down Swago Crick.

  Green-up Time

  We had a store calendar on the kitchen wall, and Granny Fanny’s old clock on the mantel struck the hours; but time, as we deeply knew it, was hitched to the circle of the year. It was the old peasant calendar, turning with the earth, from winter to spring, to summer, to autumn, back to winter again.

  In the late winter season of freezing nights and thawing days, when water began to sing under the ice, and patches of bare ground opened on the south slope, we had “sugar-makin’” in the Woodland-up-the-Hollow. There on the wooded slope stood the sugar orchard, the scattered maple trees that Captain Jim had forbidden to the loggers; and we would set up our sugar camp in the hollow beside the little spring-fed run.

  Before the sugar water began to run, we kids, Ward and Elizabeth and I, would get the sugar wood. We would go up on the woodland slope and drag and roll down the windfalls and dead limbs. It was cold and back-tearing work to grab the big end of branches two or three times my size and pull them downhill through the openings of the trees, sweeping behind me snow and dirt and leafy piles. Ward and Elizabeth could wrestle even bigger loads and roll big logs down to hold the fire. It took a lot of wood to boil down sugar water, and there was an old saying: “For a barrel of water, a rick of wood; for a jar of molasses, to boil them good.” When dusk came down into the hollow, our work would be done. With our faces and hands scratched, our mittens sodden, and our gum shoes squeaking, we plodded home toward lamplight, hot supper, and our homework for school.

  When the sugar thaw came, Mama and Granny Fanny would help us drag our sugar-making gear up-the-hollow: bundles of sumac spiles (spouts), two black kettles, the sawhorses, and the sugar buckets. On a flat below the spring were two sturdy forked posts set deep in the ground, and across them lay a heavy sapling set in the crotches of the posts and fastened with baling wire. On this crosspiece we hung our black chains and pot hooks and hoisted up the two big sugar kettles. Up in the woods, Mama traveled from sugar tree to sugar tree with the brace and bit. She would pick a new spile-place under each of the biggest limbs to set the bit in, and the pale gold-colored shavings would sprinkle down on the melting snow. The first trickle of sugar water would come from the spile hole and run, darkening, down the trunk. Mama would twist a hollow spile into the hole until it fitted, and hang up the first sap bucket. On days when there was a good run of sap, a tiny stream of water would trickle out of the spiles and the sounds of sweet water would sing in the sunshine and the melting frost runes of the hills.

  We kids gathered buckets of sap, moving from tree to tree with our three-gallon buckets. The water sweetened the black pots, and we lit the fire so the sweet water could send up its first wisps of white steam. There was always a big log or two to sit on and rest and watch the fire. We children sat like three ragged blackbirds, dressed in long black stockings, too-small dark coats, and dark stocking caps and black gum shoes. Between bouts of sap collecting, we watched and sniffed the boiling sap water.

  Black night would come as the “sweety” began to thicken, and at supper time, we would rake out little beds of coal, five of us, moving busily in our narrow ring of light. We laid thick slices of ham on the sizzling redness and waited and smelled. For dessert, there would be roasted apples, half burned and half raw, and some cane-molasses cookies from a poke.

  In some of these years, G.D. was moonlighting as a bookkeeper for the lumber company, and he would come and join us by late suppertime. Then, with the fire in the center and the black hillsides all around us, we waited for the sugar to boil down. When the sweety began to foam up like it would run over, Granny Fanny would take a piece of fat side meat fastened on a stick and run it back and forth to quiet the roiling waves. It was like the wand in my fairy story book: the whiteness would quiet, bubble softly, and begin to “smoke its pipe,” breaking the bubbles with brown puffs.

  Ward and Elizabeth and I would take our lantern and our tin pie pans and go up on the hill to hunt for a patch of clean snow to make wax balls. When Mama dribbled thickening syrup over the snowy mounds we had gathered, the amber wax would harden into clear, maple taffy.

  Mama and Granny Fanny knew all the signs exactly: when to skim off the white, dirty froth; when to run the fatback over the roiling kettle; and when to take off the molasses and sugar. When we were “sugaring off,” the hot sugar was stirred and poured into greased pans and “suggins,” to be knocked out later, when it was cool, and to be stored high on the pantry shelf for sweetening apple dumplings, oatmeal, and pumpkin pie.

  After sugar season, we watched eagerly for signs of open spring. One of the first signs was when Granny Fanny went out to the woods to dig up roots for sassafras tea. She put the red roots and pieces of bark in a pot on the back of the stove and boiled her spicy, red tea. We drank it hot and heavily sweetened, and Granny said it would thin our winter blood.

  Soon after sassafras time, it was green-up time, with the first shoots coming up out of the ground. We watched the sprouts hopefully, for this was the time of year for Granny to go to the fields and woods to pick her wild greens, the “sallets” of the old frontier. Granny Fanny taught us all the plants, and how to tell the good greens from the bad. We gathered the new poke sprouts, always being careful not to snip them too close to their poison roots; and we gathered “spotted leaf,” leaves of “lamb’s tongue,” butter-and-eggs, curly dock, new blackberry sprouts, dandelions, and a few violet leaves. Later the white meadow weed would be good, and the shepherd’s purse and milkweed sprouts. It took six gallons of leaves to make a mess of greens, and Granny would boil them in the black pot, drain off the potlikker, and fry them in hog grease because there was a saying that poke greens must be fried in hog grease or the poke would poison you to death.

  Green-up time was also ramp season; but Mama wouldn’t let a ramp come into the house, for the ramp is a vile-smelling wood’s onion whose odor, like memory, lingers on. Some of our neighbors and cousins hunted ramps every spring and carried them home in gunnysacks to boil and fry. In the spring down at school, the teacher would sometimes have to throw the windows wide open to air out the smell of ramps, wet woolen stockings, and kid sweat.

  Sex was never mentioned in our house, but in the barn and barnyard we learned early when the cows were in heat—“on a rippet,” we called it—and G.D. would drive them to some neighbor’s bull. G.D. wrote down on the kitchen calendar when each cow had gone to the bull, and we turned the buck sheep in with the ewes. One time G.D. had a man bring a stallion for old Bird and told us not to cross the fence or come near. The stallion nickered and carried on and jumped up on old Bird, but no colt came. And we saw the frogs breeding in Grandpa Will’s pond, and the rooster jumping on the hens, and the birds breeding, the butterflies, and even the house flies. Then we hunkered in the barn and sheep shed and watched the bloody borning of the lambs and calves.

  The earliest lambs were usually March lambs, and the mothers lay on beds of hay tossed down from the mow. The lambs were wet and wobbly at first but would soon be running out in the stubble field, shaking their long tails and playing chase with one another. Sometimes a bad mother sheep wouldn’t let her baby suck, wouldn’t “claim it,” we said. She would butt him and whirl around from his hungry punching, and he would cry so weak and small. Then we kids would gather him up in our arms and carry him to an old carpet behind the woodbox and feed him bottles of warm milk from the cows. He would become our pet lamb and follow us around all summer, but in the fall we would have to stand by the gate and watch Tom Beard, the cattle and sheep buyer, drive our lamb away with the others to the slaughter pens.

/>   In the spring too, the calves would come and the mother cows had them out in the wild of the pasture, or lying in the shed and looking at us with hurt and feverish brown eyes. The calf would come out slowly, all covered with bloody striffen and clots. Sometimes G.D. or Mama or Granny Fanny would have to help the calf out, and one time, when the calf wouldn’t come, G.D. cut it up in pieces to save the cow. But usually the calves would stand right up; the mother would lick them off with her tongue, and they would begin to punch around and suck.

  One summer I had a pure white calf named Lily, from old Bloss, my pink cow. I taught Lily to lead on a rope all around the yard. In the fall, Tom Beard came and drove her away. But before he did, she had moved deep into my mind, so that there has always been there a calf named Lily, white as the mountain snow.

  When we saw our first dandelion, we could take off our long winter underwear. When we saw our first bumblebee, we could go barefoot. Then, Easter would come and we had sugar eggs and beet-pickled eggs and the stormy-colored eggs the rabbits laid. Our cousins up at town found red and blue and green rabbit eggs in their yards. One time, when I wanted red and blue eggs, Ward told me that the rabbits up in town were tame, while our rabbits were wild and laid wild stormy-weather eggs between the bumps of tree roots and in the hollows of rocks up in the pasture. Our rabbit eggs were either a pale rust color or the color of walnut-shell dye, with intricate veins on them like the veins on an onion skin. After Easter, the spring rains came, and the flowers came to their nooks in the woodland, and the bluebirds came back to their holes in the fence posts and gnarly apple trees. The fence and orchard were alive then with the flashing, blue, red-breasted birds.

  In April the men went out with their horses and plows to turn the long black furrows. Cousin Rush usually did our plowing with his big team. The furrow rolled black and slick-cut from the plowshare, and the robins would leap down to pull and tug at the new fishing worms. If we had been lucky enough to see a bumblebee, we could run barefoot behind the plow and feel the cool, soft, spring-smelling earth wiggle between our toes.