The Day of Small Things Read online

  I go catch me five young cockerels I’ve been fattening and trade with the peddler for a length of domestic and a paper of needles and some thread. Mr. Aaron feels of the birds and pokes out his lips.

  “Not bad,” says he, and pushes them into the coop he has in the back of his wagon. “What more fer ye?”

  I think about it. Hit’s a two-mile walk down to Tate Worley’s store, and last time I traded there, Tate was plumb hateful. The peddler might be a little dearer but he wouldn’t be as like to talk about my business.

  “I’ll take a half a pound of coffee beans and some baking powder, iffen ye got hit,” I say. Then when he begins to rummage in the back of his wagon for the goods, I say, careless-like, as if I’d just remembered, “I believe I’ll try a bottle or two of that Cordelia Ledbetter’s Mixture. I been told hit’s a right fine tonic and I am most wore to death with this hot weather.”

  He reaches into a crate and pulls out three bottles. “All the ladies speak highly of this nostrum,” he says, solemn as can be. “It’s a very popular item.”

  I take the bottles with their pretty lavender labels and lay them in my apron with the other things. I can hear a rustling in the big boxwoods planted along the branch. I declare I hate them things so bad, with their smell of graveyards and cat piss. I’d take an axe to them if it weren’t for the trimmings man who comes ever December and buys great bundles of greenery for rich folks to stick up in their mansion-houses.

  Mr. Aaron is skirmishing round in the wagon bed, setting his goods to rights, and he don’t seem to notice when I flap my hand towards the house and whisper, “Least, you get yourself back inside!” I am purely shamed for anyone to see the child, dirty and quare as she is.

  She wiggles out from under the boxwoods, and just as I’d feared, she has stripped down to her drawers. They are black with dirt and so is she. I flap my hand again and she takes off fer the house but just then Mr. Aaron lifts up his head.

  “Little boy or little girl?” he asks. His black eyes is shining.

  “Hit’s a girl,” I say, wishing she’d moved a mite quicker. “She took my scissors to her hair back of this …” but I can tell he ain’t paying no mind for he’s turned away and is rooting around in a big old poke. At last he brings out a piece of red and white stick candy—like what we used to give the children at Christmas.

  “For your young un,” he says, pointing it at me. “A present.” He nods his head up and down when I don’t offer to take the candy and pushes it at me. “No charge, Missus.”

  I wait a bit, making sure he means it, then I hold out my hand and he lays the striped candy stick across it. “Thank you kindly. That’s right Christian of you,” I says, wondering why he would be giving away his merchandise, but he just laughs and climbs back up to his wagon seat.

  “Good day to you, Missus,” Mr. Aaron says and slaps the reins on his mule’s back. “Just you lay out of work a while—set on the porch and take a little of that tonic and see if it don’t help your feelings.”

  I wait till his wagon has gone around the bend and I can’t hear the clop of the mule’s hooves on the road no more. Then I do like he said and set down on the top step. I call for Least to come get her candy but she don’t show herself, so I lay it and the other things I’ve traded for beside me on the porch floor. I line the three bottles up and study them, then pick one and open it.

  The first sip is like fire—and hit puts me in mind of the white liquor Hobart used to get from ol man Clark. Hobart never was bad to drink, but when we was first wed, now and then him and me’d both take a little sup. Hobart would fun me, saying the liquor made me frisky-like. And it did, too. But then at a brush arbor revival down by the river—hit was 1900, three years after we married—we both took the pledge and vowed never to touch ary drop again. And I never will.

  I take another sup of tonic. This one goes down easier and I begin to feel some better. I wonder if this Cordelia Ledbetter tonic can really do what all it claims. The change is awful hard on a woman what with the night sweats and the all-overs. Oh, hit seems fine not having to fool with them bloody rags every month, but on the other side, hit just means a woman don’t get no rest. When a woman’s period is on her, she can’t make kraut or hit’ll go bad, can’t walk in the cucumbers or they’ll mildew—oh, they’s a world of things she can’t do at that time. And iffen a woman feels real puny for a few days every month, why, she can slack off on her work and no one thinks the worse of her.

  Least has come creeping out the door and gone back to the edge of the boxwoods. I don’t say nothing but I watch as she sets herself down in the dirt and starts in a-playing with the old corncobs she calls her babies. She’s made a bed for them with some of the big green leaves from the cucumber tree near the chicken house, and she’s laying them ol cobs down side by each on one leaf and covering them with another. She begins to sing one of them quare little tunes of hern and the sound goes right through my head.

  It is as bothersome as a circling wasper, so I call to her and hold out the candy stick. The child stares at it for the longest time before she creeps nigh. Then, without looking me in the face, she grabs hold and scuttles like a rat back into her hidey-hole.

  Such a quare child. Not like the others—I think back on how it once was. Happy times long ago, like the old song says.

  Me and Hobart wed in ’97 and the babes begun to come, one every year at first. Little Hobe in ’98, then Lemuel, then Willoree—like popping peas out of a pod.

  “Two boys to help with the clearing and plowing and a girl to help you in the house,” Hobart said, swelling up proud as he looked at our three strong young uns. “Hit’s a good start. We’ll pay off what we owe on this place and be free and clear in no time.”

  Ay, law, when you’re young and strong, hit seems you can beat the world. Those first years we worked like dogs, not making much but always putting some by to pay off what we owed on the place. I’d spread out a quilt at the edge of the field and lay the babies on it where I could keep watch over them as I hoed. Back then I could work as hard as ary man, even when I was in the family way.

  The next three to come was girls but Hobart never faulted me. “If they can work like their mama,” says he, “I’ll have nothing to complain of.”

  I take one more sup of Cordelia Ledbetter and stretch out my fingers. Seems to me the tonic has warmed them and made them feel more limber-like.

  Least has come back out and is setting with her play babies and rocking to and fro, singing again, but it don’t worry me so much now. I call it singing but they ain’t no words what mean anything. That child still don’t talk like she ought—oh, she’ll say a word here or there iffen she wants a thing—and she can say No, that’s for sure, but she don’t string her words together. “Oh-eee-oh-iii,” is what she’s singing, over and over to her corncob babies.

  Was a time I could line up my babies like that, I think, and the recollection brings hot tears to my eyes as I name them over—Little Hobe, Lemuel, and Willoree … Zelma, Porsha, and Fairlight. And next to last the twins, though Dexter died of the summer complaint before he was three months old, leaving Little Brother. Seven fine young uns.

  And Little Hobe went off to the Great War and come back in a box; Lemuel died just a month after his daddy, the both of them killed by the fall of the same big tree—though Hobart was killed outright and Lemuel lingered, howling from the pain and mad with the fever. Then, afore I could turn about, each by each the girls married and moved off.

  One thing is for sure, though, I don’t aim to let it happen with Least.

  Artifact: Empty Cordelia Ledbetter’s Herbal Mixture bottle, ca. 1925. Found in an overgrown dump near the barn at the old house site in Dark Holler, some scratching, small chip at lip. Traces of paper label remain.

  As early as 1877, Cordelia Ledbetter’s herbal/alcoholic mixture was a popular nostrum for a variety of female complaints. At a time when removal of the ovaries and/or uterus was a common treatment for female reproductive d
isorders—and nervous disorders as well (hysteria—derived from the Greek word for uterus—was originally defined as “furor of the womb”)—many women sought the help of Cordelia Ledbetter as a cheaper and less drastic solution to their ills.

  The original recipe for Cordelia Ledbetter’s Herbal Mixture:

  Unicorn Root (Aletris farinosa) 8 oz.—This plant was used by Native Americans to treat various female complaints, from uterine prolapse to barrenness.

  Life Root (Senecio aureus) 6 oz.—The common golden ragweed, also called Squaw Weed and Female Regulator, is a traditional uterine tonic and emmenagogue, used to produce a menstrual flow.

  Black Cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) 6 oz.—Black cohosh was and continues to be a herbal specific in the treatment of menopausal symptoms.

  Pleurisy Root (Asclepias tuberosa) 6 oz.—The orange butterfly weed that flourishes on dry pasture banks and roadsides is a carminative, used against cramps and flatulence.

  Fenugreek Seed (Trigonella foenum-graecum L.) 12 oz.—A galactagogue, fenugreek is given to nursing mothers to increase milk production.

  Alcohol (18%) to make 100 pints—The addition of alcohol as a “solvent and preservative” went a long way toward ensuring that at least some of the pain the sufferer was treating would be lessened.

  Chapter 3

  The Girl Who Can Read

  Dark Holler, 1930

  (Least)

  The yard dog speaks and I look up from the peas I’m shelling. They’s a woman and a girl coming up the road. Mama takes the bowl of peas from me and sets it on the floorboards of the porch, then jerks her chin at the door. “Go on,” she says. “Through the house and out the back way. Git you a hoe and go to work on them beans. I’ll call you when the folks is gone.”

  I duck my head yes ma’am and go quick-like into the house. But once I’m to where Mama can’t see me, I stay near the window so’s I can hear them talk. Mama don’t never talk much but for when she’s telling me what to do. Back when Fairlight was still living here, she would talk to me and read to me too. But since she run off and got herself married, they ain’t no one to talk to, being as Brother’s as close-jawed as Mama, and if he ain’t in the field, he’s gone down the road. I had wished for Fairlight to take me with her and she might have too but she was going with her man up to Detroit and Mama said I’d never stand the trip.

  “Come git you uns a chair,” says Mama as the woman and the girl start up the porch steps. I hear the mule-ear chair’s hickory bark bottom squeak like they’s mouses in it as the woman sets herself down.

  “Ooo-eee!” she says, fanning her face with her handkerchief, “now it’s been a time since I come up here to Dark Holler. Like to forgot what a hard climb it is. But I had in mind to git up to the burying ground and tend to my mamaw and papaw’s graves, for come Decoration Day, I’ll be going with Henry over to the Buckscrape where his people lie.”

  Mama don’t say nothing and I kin hear the pop of the pea pods and the little ringing sounds as the peas fall into her enamel dishpan.

  The visitor woman keeps on talking. “Fronie, tell me, was that your least un I saw just now, scooting into the house? Law, she’s growed like a weed. Don’t she go to school? Lilah Bel here’s in Three-B now and reading like one thing. It beats all, the way that child has took to learning.”

  I skooch close to the window. Careful-like, I peek round the edge to look at the girl who can read. Fairlight taught me my letters and C-A-T cat and H-A-T hat but then she went off, that was the end of it. I have hid the book about Baby Ray what she give me. I look at the pictures of Baby Ray with his dog and his kitties and all and pretend that he is my little brother. Mama don’t hold with me learning to read or going to school and right now she is telling the visitor, “It’ll just aggravate them funny spells she takes if she gets all tired out with trying to learn more ’n she’s able.”

  The girl who can read is taller than me and her eyes are as deep as the night. Her straight dark hair is real pretty—cut short like the girls in the wish book. She picks up my bowl of peas, sets down on the top step, and goes to shelling without no one even telling her to.

  Mama looks at her and nods her head. “Now, there’s a good girl. You don’t know what it is, Voncel, to have a young un what ain’t right.”

  The woman called Voncel cuts her eyes around and leans in closer to Mama. She whispers, “Well, I had heard a thing or two …”

  And Mama leans back in her chair and draws in a deep breath. Then she lets it out shhhhh and says, “I tell you what’s the truth, Voncel, that least un of mine has ways that are beyond my understanding.… Why, I’ll give you a for instance—take the time she weren’t yet three and I had set her on a quilt on the edge of the field where me and Brother was a-hoeing. She had her a biscuit she was gnawing on and a sugar tit to keep her happy.”

  Mama hitches her chair closer. “You know how it is, Voncel, you can’t be with a young un ever minute and still raise a crop. So there I was, working along, chopping at the weeds and lifting my head ever so often to look and see she ain’t got off the quilt. And then as I stop to catch my breath at the far end of the row, I hear Least singing. She does it all the time now, but this was the first time I heard it—a funny little high sound like the wind—and then I see they’s something on the quilt beside her. I take a few steps towards her, curious to see what it could be, a branch that has fell down or—but then I see it ain’t no branch. No, it is the awfullest big old copperhead you ever did see, just laying there next to her and her looking down at the ugly thing and singing that funny song.”

  The visitor woman makes a squealing sound like a pig. “Eee! Eee!” she says. “Fronie, whatever did you do?”

  “Why, Voncel, I crept down that row of corn as quiet as ever I could creep.” Mama’s talking real low now, but she’s told this story afore and I know the way of it. Mama goes on, spinning it out to make it last, to make the visitor woman set there with her mouth open all the while.

  “Brother was in the next row over,” Mama points her finger as if she could see him yet, “and he was hoeing along, not paying no mind. So when I come even with him, I spoke soft-like and pointed to the least un so’s he could see for hisself that serpent laying there next to his sister. ‘Don’t call out,’ I told him, speaking low, ‘hit might startle her and was she to move sudden …’ ”

  I put my fingers in my ears. I don’t want to hear the rest of this story. I wait, thinking about something else. When I see the visitor woman raise her hands to her mouth and then reach over to pat Mama’s shoulder, I take my fingers out and listen some more. Mama is laying back in her chair and fanning her face with her apron. The visitor woman is saying something about the school they have down the branch, but Mama cuts her off and says real sharp, “No, like I said, Voncel, Least ain’t able to go to school—on account of she takes these funny spells now and again.”

  And then Mama says like she always does, “The child’s simple and that’s the truth. And seems like it worries her to be around folks. But we get on. Now tell me, Voncel, was you able to bring me them rug patterns?”

  I see that the girl named Lilah Bel is looking right at the window where I’m peeking out. I stick my tongue out at her, then I jerk back out of sight and go quick and quiet out the back way. My special hoe, the light one with its blade worn down to where it looks like a piece of the moon, is leaning against the logs there on the back porch. I grab it and take the little path through the dark whispering trees to the bean patch.

  I make haste along the narrow trail so’s I can get them beans hoed and Mama won’t be ill with me, but I stop for a minute at the place where the Little Things stay. And then I hear the drums and see the edges of their world.

  It’s always like that—first the drums and the lights and then they show themselves. I step off the path and hunch down low so’s I can crawl up under the drooping branches. It’s under that biggest one of them old groaning trees where they have their nest. I hunker down there by the plac
e I have fixed for them, the dancing ground with the smooth river rocks, and I listen to their sounds. Then I make a picture in my mind and begin my song and the Little Things creep out.

  Chapter 4

  The Quare Girl

  Dark Holler, 1930

  (Lilah Bel)

  Lilah Bel!” Mommy calls to me from the porch and I leave my kitties and go see what it is she wants.

  “Lilah Bel,” she says when I get to the front steps, “I need for you to go up Dark Holler and tell Miz Fronie I got to have my rose rug pattern back. The feller at the store sent word there’s a lady in Asheville wants her one of the big uns and if I can get it done afore the end of the month, I’ll get paid extry.”

  I look down at the ground and drag my toe in the dirt. Dark Holler is where the quare girl lives, the one who takes fits and can’t go to school. I don’t say nothing but I make a cross in the dirt, then rub it out.

  Mommy is setting in a chair with her hurt foot up on a stool. She has mended ever thing she could find to mend and has finished piecing the Dutch Girl quilt she started last winter. She can’t get in the garden, not till her foot heals, and she is like to bust with being laid up this way.

  She makes her voice all sad and begging, like the preacher at church giving the altar call. “Won’t you do this fer me, honey? You’re a big girl. And there’s time aplenty fer you to get there and back afore first dark. You remember the way—down the branch past your Uncle Farnham’s barn and up that next holler. I wouldn’t ask you but the others is busy in the field and we could surely use the rug money long about now.”

  I have gone to Uncle Farnham’s by myself lots of times—Mommy and Aunt Alva are always borrowing things from one another and I am the one to carry those things. So I light out but as I go, Mommy calls after me, “Dalilah Belva—you take the dog along; he’ll see you safe.”