Anybody Shining (14 page)

When Aunt Jennie heard that Tom was from Baltimore, Maryland, she got all excited. “I knowed me a woman once from the place
called Chesapeake Bay!” she exclaimed. “You ever heard of it?”

“We stay there for a month every summer,” Tom told her. “My grandfather has a house there.”

Aunt Jennie nodded. “Oh, I heard it's a fine place to be. This lady I knowed, she was what you call a missionary woman. Rode up on a roan mare to preach the gospel to us, then come to learn we'd already been saved! But she was a sociable thing, and we talked and talked the whole week she was here. Got a letter from her once a month after that, all the way until her death back in 1892. She come up here in—well, let's see. I expect it was after the war—1867 or thereabouts. Mary Louise Murdock was her name.”

She looked at Tom. “I don't reckon you know any of her kin.”

“I don't,” Tom said, sounding sorry about it. “But when we go in August, I'll see if I can find anyone related to her.”

“Well, 'fore you leave here today, I'll write
down where you can send me a letter, and then you can write me and tell me if you find any of 'em. I sure would like to know. She got married late and had one baby before her change of life come. Boy named of Woodrow.”

Then Aunt Jennie went about making us dinner. She peeled up five Irish potatoes, sliced them, and set them to frying in the skillet, and she got out cornmeal and mixed it with buttermilk, and poured that into another skillet to make the cornbread.

“Only animal I keep anymore is my old cow, Silvie,” she told us. “Wish I had me a pig, but the last one I had run away and I didn't have the breath to go after it. Name of Joseph. Oh, I could eat about every part of a pig excepting the ears. I've heard of some who even fry up the ears, but I couldn't abide that, could you?”

Tom and I shook our heads and said no, ma'am. Aunt Jennie stirred the soup beans and cut an onion into the potatoes. “Now, every other part of the pig tastes good to me, even the feet, though Lord, it takes a year and a day
to get them pigs' feet clean. I like the souse you get from the head, don't you? But the last time I had a pig's head, why, I lacked the strength to cut out the eyes. Now, some eat the eyes, but I have never been favorable toward that.”

I looked at Tom, who was turning green around the edges, and I thought it best to change the direction of the conversation. “My mama makes head cheese,” I told Aunt Jennie. “But I was never sure if'n that was the same as souse.”

“Pert' near the same,” Aunt Jennie said, pulling a jar off the shelf above the stove. “Souse is when you make head cheese and then add some vinegar to it, sort of like to pickle it. Now this here is sausage that my friend Nellie Oakes brung me last time she was to the house. She cans a right plenty every fall when they butcher their hogs.”

I glanced at Tom, who still didn't look quite settled. “Do you have head cheese and such in Baltimore?” I asked, trying to reel him back into the conversation.

“We have the sort of cheese you make out of milk,” he replied in a shaky voice. “But I don't think that's what you're talking about.”

“You just tell your mommy to get aholt of a hog's head, and I'll write down a receipt for the cooking and send it your way,” Aunt Jennie promised him. “I like to mail me a letter. Don't happen but once or twice a year anymore. Might surprise you to know that I can read and write, but I most surely can. My daddy believed in it. Taught all us young'uns, boy and girl alike. You children remember the first time you looked at a word on a piece a paper and all the sudden the meaning of it just popped into your head?”

Tom said yes and told the story of when he was lying in bed recovering from getting his leg broke in five pieces from falling off a horse. His mama had left him with a stack of books two foot high, so he could look at the pictures inside to keep himself amused. One day he was flipping through a book and the word “stop” jumped out at him like a rabbit hopping
off the page. “It was like I'd been struck by lightning,” he declared to us. “I was five years old, and from that moment on, I read every book I could get my hands on.”

“Now, breaking your leg that way, is that how come you favor your right leg so?” Aunt Jennie asked, and Tom give her a straightforward nod like it didn't bother him a bit to be asked.

“I figured it had to be something like that,” Aunt Jennie said as she poked the cornbread with her finger to see if it were done. “I twisted my ankle real bad once when I was a little one. I'd just seen my first Indian out in the woods and was running home so fast I about outpaced the wind. I didn't see that root sticking up out of the ground, and Lord-a-mercy, didn't I go flying.”

Tom's eyes grew big and round. “There were Indians here?” he asked, leaning across the table toward Aunt Jennie. We was eating our dinner by then, me and Tom, Aunt Jennie hovering over us and putting more food on our plates every time there was an empty spot.

“When I was a girl, there was Indians everywhere. Cherokee, don't you know. President Jackson sent most of 'em off before I was full grown. He claimed this land was the white man's land, and my mommy agreed with him, but Daddy did not. Weren't many white folks in these parts then. We was one of the first families to settle. You see, my mommy and daddy had been indentured servants. You know what that is?”

Tom nodded, but I shook my head. “Well, it's like this,” Aunt Jennie explained. “Some folks got to this country by signing on to be a servant to a rich family. They'd pay for you to come across the ocean from England on a ship, and you agreed to do work for 'em for however many years. Daddy and Mommy come over on the same boat, and both of 'em had to work five years before they earned out their freedom. They was up in Massachusetts, where Mommy always said it were so awful cold. The minute they got the papers declaring they was free, they hitched up a mule to the wagon
and come here. Mommy said this land was unsettled as unsettled could be. Nothing but Indians and deer and squirrels. They built this homestead right where you'uns are sitting, though most of it's gone now, fallen to the weather. I moved back here after my Clayton died and all my young'uns gone off into the world. A lot of this land used to be cleared, and Daddy and Mommy farmed it. Mommy birthed fourteen young'uns and raised eight of 'em.”

“And were there Indians?” Tom asked, lifting up his plate so Aunt Jennie could drop another ladleful of soup beans on it. “Did you know any?”

“Like I said, they was here when I was a young'un. We didn't mix and mingle much. One winter, though, when it was so cold and the animals had gone deep into the woods, our whole family almost starved to death, except for the Indians would lay bundles of food outside that very door there. Dried jerky meat and clay pots filled with stew. I reckon that food's all what kept us alive. Daddy said they could
have just as easy starved us out. But I think they knowed he tried hard to be a good neighbor. He knowed where their sacred places on the river was and never tread on 'em.”

Well, we could have stayed the whole day visiting and hearing Aunt Jennie's stories, but it become clear to us after dinner that Aunt Jennie had grown weary. “I do like to take a nap of an afternoon,” she admitted when we said we thought we best go. “But I hope you children will come back. You've brung up all sorts of memories to me. I'll think on 'em and see if I can't find some more Indian stories to tell you, Master Tom. And I'll write down that souse receipt for your mommy to make.”

We said our good-byes and promised to come back on Tuesday morning and bring Aunt Jennie some greens from the garden and some fatback, which she'd been lacking since the loss of Joseph.

“You reckon your mama's going to make you some souse when you get back to Baltimore?” I asked Tom as we began our walk back through the woods toward home.

He laughed. “Mother doesn't step foot in the kitchen, and Sally Ann is the least adventuresome cook you've ever met in your life. Mostly she just boils things until they're hardly recognizable as food. Father complains, but Mother stays loyal to Sally Ann because she cooked for Mother's family growing up.”

“I never heard of somebody having a cook come in from outside the home to make your meals, except in books. I don't know if Mama would like that or not. She's particular about her cooking.”

“Look at it this way. Having a cook frees up Mother to do other things with her time, such as start schools for fishermen and take trips up to the mountains.”

“I'm glad she has a cook then,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn't be here.”

Tom grinned. “I'm glad about it too. Now let's keep our eyes open in case Oza appears.”

I'm sorry to report that we did not see Oza on our walk down the mountain to home. But
maybe we will when we come back with the creasy greens and the fatback. Maybe this time she won't disappear so fast on us and we can get to know her.

I know you must believe me addled to think such things, but if you were here with me, I feel assured you would be thinking them too.

Signed,

Your Cousin,

Arie Mae Sparks

Dear Cousin Caroline,

I just finished my chores and decided to sit down and write you before Mama puts supper on the table. The whole time I was weeding in the garden, I was pondering once again why you ain't ever wrote me back. I have written you fourteen letters in a month's time, which is a righteous good number for you to not have answered nary a one, even if your mama is against the idea of it.

Here's something I ain't told you. I have copied over every letter I've wrote you so I will remember all the things I've said. That's
right, I have copied fourteen letters word for word! And every time I sit down to write a new one, I read the one I wrote before, so I won't repeat a thing. I have worked hard to make my letters interesting to you and worth the time it takes to read them.

I got to thinking out there while I was pulling up the sow thistle and the bindweed, wondering if maybe my letters never got to your house. Why, maybe Miss Ellie stole each and every one of them, so she would have gossip to share out every morning when folks come in to pick up their mail. Or maybe it's the person who's in charge of getting the mail delivered down in Raleigh. Maybe your post office man is so lazy he throws my letters away so he won't have to carry them to your house.

And then it come to me. Maybe your mama is not showing you the letters I send! Maybe every time one of my letters arrives at your door, she scoops it up and throws it in the fire! The more I thought about it, the more
I become convinced that your mama is getting in the way of you and me being friends.

I don't rightly know much about your mama, Cousin Caroline, but I remember every detail Mama ever told me. I think I remember it so well because of the way Mama's eyes would light up when she got to talking, and how dark they was by the end of the tale.

I know your mama's name is Anna and that she is two years younger than Mama, and in the year of 1908 she run off with a young doctor from Raleigh, who four years later would become your daddy. Mama says he was doing missionary work with folks from his church, tending to the sick and the dying, and your mama, Anna, went to see him because her eyes had been bothering her. “Anna always had bad allergies come summer,” Mama would say. “Mommy give her all sorts of teas and tinctures, but not a one helped.”

When Anna went to the doctor, he give her some drops that cleared her allergies right
up, and then they fell in love. No one was surprised, as Anna Blevins was knowed to be the prettiest girl in Cranberry.

I know that your mama wrote a few letters home and then fell silent. Her daddy, our granddaddy, Elvin Blevins, rode a horse to Raleigh and found her, and she said she loved him and all her family, but she weren't ever coming back to the mountains. Once Granddaddy and Granny Blevins died, she stopped sending word back to Stone Gap. Anna was done with us for good.