The Day of Small Things (10 page)

Granny Beck told me it was no good. She said being chained up all his life like that, he’d learned not to trust no one and would bite me if I fooled with him.

“The poor critter don’t know nothing but his prison,” she said and began to tell me of Snap, a little white dog she had once had. She told me how smart and friendly Snap was and how he would sit up and beg and would go fetch a stick and lay down and roll over and oh! all kinds of tricks.

The more she talked about Snap, the sorrier I begun to feel for the yard dog and I wondered, was I to turn him loose what would happen. I knowed Mama wouldn’t hold with letting him loose but it seemed to me that he might be happier if he could go free now and again. So the next time Mama was gone, while the yard dog was sleeping I crept up and undid his chain where it was hitched to the box.

“Get up, you!” I said. “I’m turning you loose. You can run and play,” I told him and I tossed the chain towards him so he could see what I had done.

He lifted his head and looked at me, then very, very slowly he got up. He begun to walk all around his patch of dirt, just a-dragging that chain after him. He must of known that he was loose, that he could go anywhere he wanted, but he never did. He circled round a few more times and went into his box.

I went into the house where Granny Beck was by the woodstove working on another rug. When I told her what I had done and how the dog wouldn’t run and play, she shook her head real sad-like.

“He don’t know how to be free,” she said and then she frowned. “I thought he offered to bite if you come near him. How did you get the chain off him?”

“It’s still on him,” I said, poking some more billets into the woodstove. “I undone it at the box.”

“Oh, honey,” she cried, “you must run and fix it back. Don’t you see? If he did run off, that chain could be the death of him was it to catch on something deep in the woods. He’d die of thirst or starve to death. Go on now, hurry!”

So I did like she said and was glad to find him in his box. “Maybe you knowed you shouldn’t go off dragging that chain,” I told him as I hitched it back. “But I’ll find a way …”

It was a few days later when Granny Beck was teaching me all the uses of catnip that I had my idea.

“… colds, to break the fever, headaches, colic—oh, there’s a many a use for this,” said she, sniffing at the sprig I’d brung her from the garden. “Small wonder folks brought it with them from the old country.”

She put the tender leaves into her mouth and begun to chew them. “They taste of spring,” she said and closed her eyes, almost like she was praying.

For a moment Granny Beck was quiet and then she said, “You can make a poultice for a sore that’s slow healing and a strong tea from the leaves will help a body to sleep.”

I couldn’t make the tea right away for the plants were not yet big enough, but when summer came and the plants grew tall and bushy with their lavender-blue flowers just a-bobbing up and down as the bees lit on them, I took a knife and cut an armful of the strong-smelling branches.

When the tea was done, I put a little honey in a cup of it and took it to Mama. Granny Beck had said it might calm Mama’s nerves, but when I offered her the cupful, Mama just laughed a hateful, unhappy laugh like always.

“What do I want with that old Injun tea?” she asked and reached for her bottle of Cordelia Ledbetter. “This suits me fine; you take that cup to that old woman and let her drink it if she thinks it’s so good.”

That night, though, when I fed the yard dog, I mixed some of the strong catnip tea into his cornbread and milk. He sniffed at it like he knew it was different somehow but in the end he lapped it all up.

Later, when I could hear Mama snoring in her room, I crept outside and saw that the dog was snoring too. He didn’t stir as I came near, and even when I laid hands on his collar, he didn’t wake.

I had decided that the thing to do was to unbuckle his collar, take it off him, and buckle it back so it would look like he had slipped out of it. It was my hope that he would go run around a little, then come back and Mama would see that he didn’t have to stay chained up all the time. Or maybe, I thought, he would just run away to somewhere he wouldn’t have to be tied up ever.

I got up early, just before first light, and slipped outside to find out was he gone. When I peeked in his box and
didn’t see him, I almost laughed out loud to think of him running free. The chain and empty collar was laying there and I decided I best stretch it out tight so it would seem that he had slipped out of his collar. I caught it up and was moving slow and careful to the edge of the dirt circle when I heard a kind of whimpering sound.

There, still inside the circle, was the yard dog, crouched down and all a-tremble. When he saw that I had his collar in my hand, he begun to crawl to me, unching along on his belly till he was at my feet. Then he just lay there, making tiny little crying sounds in his throat and I seen that he wanted his collar back on.

“So he let you touch him?” Granny Beck whispered when I had told her what happened.

“I don’t understand it,” I said, as I helped her out of bed and to the chamber pot, “the minute I got the collar back on him, he growled at me and went back in his house.”

“He’s been on that chain all his life,” said she. “I reckon he can’t feature any other way to live.”

Mama never did know what I was about with the yard dog. Every night I would let him loose—after a while, he grew used to me and I didn’t have to use the catnip tea to make him sleep—and every morning I would find him still there, still laying in that old dirt circle, and I would put the collar back on. I began to grow aggravated at him for not seeing that he could be free and had almost made up my mind to give it up, when one morning I found him outside of the circle, sniffing at the grass.

I stayed just as quiet, hoping he would go on and take to the woods, but then he caught sight of me and went back and lay down, half in and half out of his box.

When I put the collar on him, I whispered to him of the woods and the mountaintop and all the things a free dog might do, but once more he just put his head between his front paws and heaved a big old sigh like he was wore out.

“It ain’t no use,” I told Granny Beck while Mama was up at the little house. “He’d just as soon stay tied up, I believe.”

She looked at me for the longest time without a word. Then she put her head on one side. “Tell me, Least, have
you
ever thought of going away from here?”

Just then Mama come back in the house, fussing because the bees was making a nest under the step stone at the back porch.

“I hate them things,” she said. “It seems likes there’s more and more every year. This evening, Least, when they’re all in their nest, I want you to dash some lamp oil down the hole and kill them, every one.”

I did like Mama said—poured the lamp oil down the hole. I had to for she would be expecting to smell it still in the morning. But I waited till she was dozing over her tonic and then I sung the Calling Song, telling the Little Things there was danger and they must go somewhere else. They come out one by one till there was a great cloud of them hanging in the air, humming and quivering just above my head.

Go on
, I told them,
it ain’t safe for you here
.

It was a sight on earth, how that thick cloud of bees
begun to lengthen out and then move up towards the woods, like a great snake swimming through the air. I tried to watch to see where they went but they disappeared into the dark.

Once more I went out to let the yard dog loose, and this time, the instant I took the collar off, he made for the grass at the edge of his dirt patch and begun to roll. Well, anyway, I thought, he can have a taste of freedom, even if he don’t go off. He was still sniffing around the rim of the dirt circle when I went inside, and I figured that I’d tie him back in the morning like always.

But in the morning he was gone, never to return. When I told Granny Beck, she looked at me hard and said, “He finally got off the chain that was in his head: do you see that, honey? The chain in his head was stronger than the one you undid every night. You remember that, now. It ain’t only dogs that is on chains.”

Mama, she didn’t seem to care much. “That old dog was getting up in years anyway,” said she. “It’ll save me the bother of knocking him on the head.”

(Granny Beck)

I
fixed a big vessel of the tea for your rheumaticks, Granny Beck. And I did it just according to how you said—gathered laurel, ivy, and dog-hobble leaves this morning and from the east side of the bushes. I put them in the pot and covered them over and as much again with water, then boiled them down good afore straining the tea.”

Least is standing there by my bed, holding a gallon crock with a dishtowel wrapped round it. The steam rises and makes a wreath around her pretty head. She sets the crock down careful-like on the chair by the bed.

“Let me help you set up to where you can soak your hands in this—it’s good and hot and ought to help with the aching—and while you do that, I’ll wet the towel and rub the tea on your legs.”

The child is so bright-eyed and hopeful that I can’t bring myself to tell her that what ails me is past curing. It ain’t only the rheumaticks, but there is something else amiss, something deep in my innards what ain’t right.

“Mama’s gone to Ransom to do some trading and she’ll not be back till this evening. I’ve got all my chores done up.…”

Her blue eyes are sparkling like the sun a-dance on the water as she lays back the quilts and begins to rub my poor old limbs. Her touch does me more good even than the medicine she has brewed.

Oh, how the child has changed in these few years! That half-wild, dirty-faced little creature I first saw is as pretty a girl as ever there was. I have poured all my learning into her, and my love too, like she was an empty pitcher and me a gushing spring. No, more like she was a piece of parched earth, thirsty for the rain, for a pitcher could overflow and she has soaked up every bit of learning and love I could give her.

“That’s done me a world of good, child,” I tell her when the tea begins to cool, and truth is, I do feel better. I look over out the window and see that the sun is shining hard and that the wind must of laid, for them dark old trees is still for once. “If it ain’t too cold, I’d like to set outside in the sunshine for a little.”

It is one of those bright October days with the sky that clear endless blue and the sun setting fire to the reds and golds of the mountain trees—the sourwoods and maples and hickories. Least brings out an armchair from the house and helps me to it, then tucks my Delectable Mountains quilt around me. My eyes has grown dim to where I can’t make out much more than shapes and colors but nevertheless it feels fine to be out in the air, breathing the smell of the deep woods that loom up across the way.
It seems that as my eyes has begun to give out, my nose has taken up the slack. I can travel the woods even though I can’t leave the porch, and I draw in all the old friendly smells—leaf mold and rich dirt, along with a world of other scents—spice bush and the clean smell of the water in the branch over yon. There’s even a smell to the sun falling on a dry rock … and another for that same rock when the rain first strikes it and still another when the rock is soaked and cool. So many ways of knowing …

If I could get around a little better … if I could have walked with Least through those woods, showing her all the healing plants and how they look at the different times of the year, just the way my papaw did for me …

She sets herself down on the porch floorboards beside me and leans against my legs. There is a healing warmth in the child’s touch and I know that the Gifts are stronger in her than ever before.

“Least, honey,” I say, stroking her pretty dark hair, “do you remember what the Cherokee tell about how sickness came into the world?”

She turns her face up and smiles at me. “I’ll say it like you told me, Granny, so you can be sure I learned it right.”

I know that she has learned it all, but the pleasure of hearing her say over the words, same as I learned from my papaw long years since, is like a crown on the beauty of this day. I sit, feeling the sun on my face, smelling the woods, and listening to Least. I am hungry for all the good things of living, hungry to know them all at once, like a greedy young un left alone at a full table afore the company comes, trying to stuff some of everything in his mouth. I am greedy for life for I have heard the black
wings beating and I know that afore much longer it’ll be over.

“… and when all the animals seen how bad that people was doing them, killing them or making them slaves or harming them for no reason at all, like young uns stomping on bugs just for the fun of it, well, all the animals got together in a council and one by one, each animal thought up some manner of sickness to punish man for his heedless ways …”

I remember my papaw acting out the story, even down to the part where the grub worm cuts such a shine at the thought of getting back at men that he jumps up in the air and falls on his back and has to go a-wiggling along that way forever after.